New Server, New Software

Posted: 04/25/2018 23:26:07, in category WITS News


The internet is not a safe place. It seems to become more disruptive each month. Spam, mal-ware, now ransom-ware and attacks on servers and services all over the planet.

Since we started this web-site, we have hosted it on various servers in different parts of the world. The CMS - content management system that we used was not updated regularly and was showing its age.

So it finally reached the time where we had other projects we are working on that needed improved internet access and server capacity.

Update Feb. 2022 - further updates to our infrastructure. Purchased our own server hardware and host this with some other servers I manage and look after.

Thus we now lease a server from a local business in the wonderful city we live in.

Tauranga Moana

We have also taken this opportunity to look for more resilient and less popular software. Less popular means less likely to be attacked as the returns are not as high for the efforts needed to find flaws and attack vectors that enable a site to be compromised.

The weakest link is still usually someone's password, so the number of folk with access are few and tools are used to limit the success of brute force attacks. We also get to have some pleasant eye candy, photos etc.

We trust that the new site is easy to navigate, and layout improvements aid readability.

For those with a technical bent - we use CentOS 7 and Ubuntu Server 20.04 as the server OS. We utilise PHP v7 and CodeIgniter 3.x as these are regularly patched and updated to deal with security flaws.