Perishable Press switched to A Small Orange [ASO] in March of 2007. At the time, I was looking for highly recommended shared hosting with several key features:

Update 2011/02/05: ASO is no longer my host. As this article explains, ASO service was great at the start, but after three years quality of service has declined considerably. There are some great people at ASO, but I can no longer recommend them for serious web hosting. For more information, check out my post on switching to Media Temple.</update>

• Solid customer service and extremely reliable server uptime
• Unlimited domains with plenty of disk space and bandwidth
• Unlimited Email accounts, MySQL databases and everything else

A Small Orange delivers all of the above in every shared hosting plan. ASO provides hosting plans perfect for any size operation:

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There is a major problem with the “Hotlink Protection” feature of cPanel. To summarize the issue, allow me to quote a recent email sent to a completely unresponsive tech support department:

…The problem is that if I try to include any rewrite rules for permalinks, hotlinking, or blocking spambots, cPanel automatically enables its “Hotlink Protection” feature. And, even worse, it automatically adds every URL from every rewrite rule (even the ones for blocking spambots) to its “auto-discovered” list of URL’s for which image access is allowed. This means that every spammer that I am trying to block now has access to my images! If I try to remove the spammers directly from the “allow-image-access” list, the associated rewrite rules are automatically removed from my htaccess file, thus giving spammers full access to my entire site (instead of just access to images). So, it is indeed the case that I can’t add any rewrite rules to my site’s root htaccess file without cPanel automatically assuming that every URL on the page is related to hotlinking and subsequently adding them all to the “allow-image-access” list…

In other words, cPanel screws up htaccess rewrite rules via its “Hotlink Protection” feature. More specifically, spammers and robots that are denied site access via root-htaccess rewrite rules are automatically listed in the “allow access to images” field of the Hotlink Protection panel. Not good. Even worse, disabling Hotlink Protection automatically removes every rewrite rule from the htaccess file. Such bizarre functionality forces the user to choose between complete hotlink protection and other essential features such as pretty permalinks or spam blocking. Pretty sucky if you ask us. Nonetheless, here is a concise summary of the problem with the cPanel Hotlink Protection (cHP) feature:

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Harvesting Raw Logs For those of us using cPanel as the control panel for our websites, a wealth of information is readily available via cPanel ‘Raw Access Logs’. These logs are perpetually updated with data involving user agents, IP addresses, HTTP activity, resource access, and a whole lot more. Here is a quick tutorial on accessing and interpreting your cPanel raw access logs.

Part One: Grab ‘em

To grab a copy of your raw access logs, log into cPanel and click on the "Raw Access Logs" icon. Within the Raw Access Log interface, scroll through the list of available log files and download the raw access log(s) of your choice.

Exit cPanel and navigate to your local copy of the raw access log, which should have been downloaded as a zipped/g-zipped file (i.e., .zip or .gz file extension), with a name similar to accesslog_your-domain.com_4_20_2007.gz.

Unzip the file and extract its contents, which should be a single file named your-domain.com. Rename the file by appending a .log or .txt extension to the file name. Alternatively, if the file is not named with a .com, .net, or .whatever extension, no rename is necessary, as it also may be opened via right-click » ‘Open With…’.

That’s all there is to it. If you understand how to interpret the contents of your Raw Access Log, you’re solid gold, baby. Otherwise, continue reading for a breif tutorial to get you started with the basics..

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