Tag: hosting

Discussing Web, email, dns, and any other type of hosted service.

Host search concluded, the winner: Knownhost

A while back, I about Plesk and http.include. I casually mentioned my hoster, but I then realized I never really made an announcement that I have in fact concluded my search and decided on a host.

I decided on a company called Knownhost. So far, so good. Actually so far, so great.

I chose them for a few reasons (in order):

  1. Seemed to have good support
  2. True root access in a true VPS environment
  3. Good price
  4. Plesk control panel (although you can pick from many others)
  5. Ready to go servers (no installation of other software required)

I’m a big fan of the Web Hosting Talk forums. I cruised those for a few days reading various posts about VPS hosters. Knownhost personal have a pretty good presence on those forums. They answer various questions about tech and linux stuff, rarely (if ever) pushing their own company. I liked what I was reading.

They are a young company. I vaguely remember that they formed in 2005, although I could be wrong. In the age of come-and-go hosting companies, I was not fond of this fact. In an email to support, a gentlemen by the name of Jay responded “We are a new brand but have been in the industry for over 15 yrs …” I took a gamble and signed up with them knowing I could exercise the 30 day money back guarentee if need be.

Now check this out: I signed up around 9pm pacific time. I received a phone call roughly 10 minutes later from Knownhost with a question about my credit card (I put in the wrong billing address). I was impressed. We got the address corrected and I was up and running shortly. Some people may think that sounds weird for a hoster to call past 9pm … but I say it’s smart as I was obviously up and had just placed the order.

Over the months I’ve had a technical question or two and they’ve always answered them promptly and politely. I usually get a response in under 30 minutes. Nice!

From a technical standpoint, everything has been running very smoothly. I have yet to experience any down time in the roughly year and a half I’ve used them. To be clear, that’s ZERO (0) down time.

I would confidently recommend them to others seeking a quality VPS.

Modifing the Plesk login page (removing Virtuozzo ad, changing ‘login to plesk’ text)

Let’s disable/remove the Virtuozzo promo/ad on the Plesk login page.

Via the anonymous blogger over at www.swart.org.za/wordpress (seriously, I couldn’t find any identifying info on the site) I now know how to remove the hideous Virtuozzo ad that appears on the login page of Plesk.

Quoting swart.org.za:

To disable the promo, edit the lanuage (sic) file, located here:

/usr/local/psa/admin/plib/locales/en-US/messages_en-US.php

Search for the following string:

virtuozzo__promotion

To clarify a few things:

  1. That’s two underscores (__) in “virtuozzo__promotion”
  2. You’ll be setting the value of “virtuozzo__promotion_top” to empty single quotes. So the final line would look like this:
    'ui__promotion/virtuozzo__promotion_top' => '',

While in there, I discovered you can change the “Login to Plesk 8.2.1” (or whatever your version is) text that appears on the login page from this same file. I’m speaking of the text that appears above the login boxes, near the icon of the keys. Search for “login_up__login_label_plesk” and change the value to whatever text you like. The final product looks like this on my server:

Modified Plesk Login Page

Bye bye ugly SWSoft promo text! Thank you mysterious stranger at swart.org.za!