Here are some great Black Friday deals on software and servers!

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Deal # 1

cPanel Varnish Plugin Owned – 50% OFF
Coupon: BF50%OFF
Order Now

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Deal # 2

DirectAdmin Varnish Plugin Owned – 50% OFF
Coupon: BF50%OFF
Order Now

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Deal # 3

$1 First Month Dedicated Server
Quad Core Xeon W3520 8-vcore Xeon 2.67GHz
12GB DDR3 RAM
2x1TB SATA (RAID-1)
2TB Bandwidth
UNIXy Truly Fully Managed
First Month: $1
Subsequent Months: $249/Mo
Order Now: Email sales@unixy.net

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Deal # 4

$1 First Month VPS Server
This special applies to all VPS servers
UNIXy Truly Fully Managed
First Month: $1
Subsequent Months: See price page: http://www.unixy.net/vps-hosting
Order Now: Email sales@unixy.net

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That’s all folks!

We have big news about Black Friday! SO BIG, in fact that we’re not waiting until Friday to tell everyone. We have decided to make all dedicated and VPS servers available for $1 for the first month on Black Friday only! Get ready to contact sales@unixy.net to get full details on this deal.

**This deal is available for new orders only. This special cannot be applied to upgrades or used for current service.

I am proud to pre-announce our strategic expansion of Web hosting operations in Europe and in North Africa. Taking on this initiative is consistent with our vision to become a world-wide player in the managed server arena. More information will become available soon.

UNIXY is pleased to announce the release of Fastlayer, the HTTP accelerator for the cloud. For more information, visit fastlayer.com

The Fastlayer concept sprung to life from the need to provide HTTP acceleration and caching to a growing base of clients running disparate platforms. The software is modeled to work as a dedicated appliance platform with multi-tenant capabilities. Fastlayer provides the software and the client allocates the hardware (or virtual machine). But allow me backtrack a bit and start from the beginning.

Several years ago, UNIXy, a fully managed hosting services firm, started offering Varnish Cache to clients as demand for such software grew immensely. A few years later, they built a limited set of tools to automate installation and support. UNIXy supports a large set of control panels. In fact, the firm supports all third party software. Support became even more challenging at that point.

Then comes the cPanel Varnish Plugin, which offered installation, management, and integration with the well known Web hosting control panel cPanel WHM. It was followed a few months later by the DirectAdmin Varnish Plugin; ad nauseam.

Fastlayer to the rescue

Here we are today having built Fastlayer. Third party application support is no longer a concern for clients that need acceleration and caching. Fastlayer acts as an acceleration layer and can host hundreds of host names (virtual hosts). It’s manageable and API-enabled so it’s programmable.

How to obtain Fastlayer

We are currently undergoing beta testing of the product with a diverse set of cloud operators,  Web service providers, and individuals. Fastlayer is always looking to reach out to more folks and organizations so be sure to contact us.

Hitting the news today is a concerted DDoS attack effort directed at Amazon as vendetta for its role in ousting Wikileaks.org off its hosting cloud. The attackers are so determined they are asking everybody on the planet to download this program called Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC) and launch it against Amazon. In this post, we’rel sharing a flaw in the program that we think can be used to mitigate the attack, to an extent.

The program is written in C# with its source code available for anyone to inspect it and modify it. In fact one has to compile the code in order to use the tool. The flaw in this program is apparent in the source code of the program. In file HTTPFlooder.cs at line 63, the payload of the request is constructed like this:

byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(String.Format(“GET {0} HTTP/1.0{1}{1}{1}”, Subsite, Environment.NewLine));

This is at the heart of the attack. It consists of a flood of HTTP GET request using protocol 1.0. These kind of attacks are difficult to defend against because the request looks very similar to a legitimate request coming from a typical Web user. The request flows through several layers in the OSI stack and exhausts a lot of computing resources – all the way to the 7th logical layer of the OSI model.

But notice that this request is missing the host header (Example: Host: www.amazon.com). This fact alone can help with filtering the attack. One could ensure that all requests contain this important header either in the Web server configuration (imperfect solution). The optimal solution, however, is to introduce specialized ASIC deep packet inspection devices with proper signatures to filter out the attack.

That’s all folks!

JFK once coined the phrase to promote his efforts around building a dam back in 1963 in a desperate push to revive the economy.I’m afraid I’m going to put the above aphorism in a not-so-bright light. There are many floating startups on the Web who have been valued at exorbitant sums. The valuations are so excessive that many folks are hinting at another dot com bust.

Let’s step back a few years to go over some of the precursors of today’s state of affairs. Here’s a very concentrated but less deserving recount to what I think has led to this nonsense. In 2007, the US triggered a world-wide financial crisis due to many years of accumulated recklessness by financial institutions. The illiquidity was so staggering that banks stopped lending money to other peer banks and consumers. This deadlock was so extreme that the crisis almost rivaled the Great Depression.

The Fed intervened by making  an all-you-can-eat virtual cash box available to these banking institutions. The several rounds of cash infusions were meant to encourage the banks to lend in the hopes of kick starting the ailing economy. Alas, banks kept the cash to artificially increase their liquidity levels and avoid the looming stress tests. The availability of these assets and the terms under which they were lent made it almost unnecessary for the banks to try to seek a return on the freely available cash. Again, why risk lending when you can artificially make the balance sheet look good and honker down in safety waiting for the storm to pass?

With this excess in cash and the effects of the crisis, banks had no reason to lure cash-wealthy individuals with high interest rates. In fact, the interest rates dropped dramatically. This fact alone is crucial in understanding the current state of affairs in this Web economy. Here you have a lot of cash-wealthy individuals with poor interest rates and almost no other way to get a higher return.

The need for higher returns means that these investors, and there are many of them right now, have to take more, thought-to-be-calculated, risk; add to it Google’s acquisition success stories every now and then, and you have the perfect oil to fire ratio to get us where we are today. We’re not finished yet. Expect one or two more years before it bursts. The good news for some folks is that the world economy would have recovered well by then to sustain the Internet down cycle but it remains bad news for those making a living on the net like us.

Here we are rising in concert unaware of the looming low tide ahead. Enjoy the view while it lasts.

That’s all folks! I hope you appreciate this article.