Looking for advanced cPanel, CloudLinux optimization

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Posted by Chris`, 11-03-2014, 02:16 PM
We operate a small hosting division and are in need of a consultant to review our current server configuration, make improvements to security and mail settings as well as suggest next step growth hardware/software configurations. We've been having lots of problems with the server going down or slowing down from brute/ddos attacks on wordpress sites as well as ridiculous amounts of spam. We currently have 355 cPanel accounts on the server we would like to review. There are probably close to 500 domains. We also run email hosting and email marking from the same server. Can anyone recommend a certified cpanel IT consultant company or person we can contact?
Posted by Eased, 11-03-2014, 04:30 PM
We also suffer from attacks on client's WordPress environment almost 24 hours a day. A correctly tuned CloudLinux resource limitations can help reduce the impact of this server-wide. Do you currently use a CSF/Fail2Ban/APF firewall type solution? Seems to me like your putting all your eggs in one basket, and you need to scale-out a bit. Split out the mail services, or look into a service like SpamExperts spam filtering.
Posted by Chris`, 11-03-2014, 04:44 PM
Yes, we have CSF on there with mod_security and it does filter a lot of the attacks. Sometimes 10-15 domains will get hit at once and caused a mini-meltdown. Thanks for the advice, we are looking into setting up a dedicated mail server. I will check out SpamExperts. We're also running MailScanner but it can be resource intensive since maybe 50k emails go in and out of this server daily.
Posted by George_Fusioned, 11-03-2014, 06:39 PM
We use this simple bash script to block (using csf) any IPs that did more than 25 requests against wp-login.php within the last hour: (If you run a csf cluster, you can replace "csf -d" with "csf -cd") I run it every 15 minutes via cron, and it does it's job pretty well. You can replace "25" in "gawk '$1>25'" with the amount of requests against wp-login you want to allow per IP. We've never seen legitimate requests exceed this number, but if you want to lower/increase it, that's what you need to edit.
Posted by Chris`, 11-03-2014, 08:04 PM
Wow, this is a fantastic idea!