• Client: Knight Security Services (UK) Ltd, Derby
• Website: www.knightsecurityderby.com
• Description: Knight Security Services is providing exceptional security service in Derby since 1992.
• Type: SME
• Market: Security Services
• Area: Derby, UK
• Services provided: website design, search engine optimisation, managed virtual private server hosting

Brief

My brief was simply to create a professional looking website based on the existing visual identity and make sure the content was optimised for search engines. The new website is also available as a mobile version and optimised for iOS devices such as iPhone, iPads and Android tablets and phones.

About the client

Knight Security are a leading security company, established since 1992, providing manned guarding, key holding and alarm response services as well as mobile patrols to businesses in Derby and surrounding area.

My existing client morphose Ltd, an M&A advisory in property and FM from London, decided to expand their online presence and asked me to develop a new version of their website for them.

I am proud to announce their new website is now live: http://www.morphose.co.uk/

About morphose Ltd

“Morphose’s purpose is to help businesses transform by applying our business experience, extensive networks and our access to research in the Facilities Management, Support Services and Property sectors.

“When Business Owners, Executives or Investors want to transform their organisation from where they are today, this could involve acquiring another business or targeting a merger partner or selling part or all of the business, then Morphose can provide insightful and informed advice from experienced professionals.”

from: http://www.morphose.co.uk/

Web Design

Get a new website designed and delivered swiftly, FREE 6 months virtual private web hosting and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) included!

<?php echo "http://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']  . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?>

This will work for both posts and pages and outside the loop. I am using this for things like social media sharing buttons for example. Use it anywhere in your WordPress template to get the URL. Use the_permalink() only for posts and within the loop!

Hope this helps someone else wondering why the_permalink() is displaying abnormally when used outside the loop and for pages

Actually that should be: “Guess who has covered the first 6 entries on Google for the search phrase ‘cameraman milton keynes’?” (Google Search for “cameraman milton keynes“)

OK, it’s me! ;D Thanks to a little more optimisation in the last few days and a suitable listing from www.4rfv.co.uk. Thanks to Richard from 4rfv for sorting me out with a free listing. If you work in media and like a listing too, please get in touch with Richard Inman (rinman at 4rfv dot co dot uk) and mention my name.

Now I shall spend some more time widening my net and target Buckinghamshire too, plus enhance my search engine visibility by adding location information.

FREE SEO Consultation Offer

Get a FREE search engine optimisation consultation to help boost your visibility in the New Year! Call me on +44 1908 90 49 90 or Skype asegebrecht.

Free SEO consultation limited to a single website and last for a maximum of one hour. No purchase required. This offer is unconditional and may be withdrawn at any time without notice. One free SEO consultation per customer only.

Check out the new page dedicated to renting my HD video camera and production gear on the page aptly titled “HD Video Camera Rental in Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire)“!

Got any questions? Please do not hesitate to contact me or post it as a comment below.

Also, I moved my videos on YouTube to a new channel which is under my proper name and email address now. Check out the brand new showreel playlist!

The links in the menu on the top right have also been updated

An Essential Travel Production (http://www.essentialtravel.co.uk)

Cameraman: Axel Segebrecht
Edited by: Essential Travel

Equipment Used: Sony XDCAM EX3 (video camera), Sennheiser G3 wireless microphone system with Rode NTG-2 mic

Special Offer Get a VPS with 512MB RAM and 3GB disk space for just £9.99 inclusive of VAT!

Subscription via PayPal; no minimum term; VPS created within 12 hours of payment made; service provided by Brighter Computing Ltd; terms and conditions / AUP apply; VAT receipts provided automatically

An introduction

I have have been hosting websites amongst other things since the good old days of acoustic modems and bbs (bulletin board systems), where you had to dial a regular phone number to connect to a remote computer!

This is a long time ago now and I have always tried to make small resources go further, just because its fun tinkering with hardware and software that way. A while ago I offered hosting on my own hardware at befriended data centres and at some point even from my office through a leased line.

Times have changed and with an awful lot of competition offering hosting at nearly zero cost to a customer, my hosting service has changed somewhat.

Today virtual machines and the ‘cloud’ are en-vogue and thankfully offer the enterprising hoster a way to generate an income. Various control panels and scripts make the job of a sys-admin that much easier but also introduce a lot of pitfalls. In fact, a lot of those ‘rock bottom’ virtual machine service providers are run by people that have no idea what they are doing and usually on dubious hardware and in suspect data centres. (this is based on a few months trying out various providers to see what it is like… quite shocking)

Coming from knitting stuff by hand, I tend to stay away from control panels as the free ones usually make more work then they save me and the good ones cost license fees that erode the already slim profits.

A word of advice

Should you compete with the low-end providers, you need bags of cash, a lot of hardware and solid software. Most of us won’t fit in that category.

Should you wish to compete with Rackspace™ and the like, you need bags of cash, a lot of good hardware and excellent software as well as a battalion of friendly, dedicated and very hard working staff. I hence you won’t fit in that category either.

So where do you fit?

This is for you to decide and I can only give you an example of the route I took: offering a solid, managed service at a price point my customers (small businesses and professionals) can afford.

In other words, somewhere between Rackspace™ and your 99p hoster (that’s a gap as wide as the Pacific -ed).

Try to find yourself a respectable provider (like OVH) and don’t make the mistake of buying the cheapest dedicated box you can find (*cough* Kimsufi *cough*)! Get something that comes with a decent specification but fits in your budget.

Price yourself on service and professionalism rather than features and price point. Fighting somebody on price and features is hard, making a stand on reputation and service much easier.

An Example

One of my servers is rented from OVH and provides me with 16GB RAM and 120GB disk space (on two SSDrives in s/RAID1). Discounting 2GB RAM and 20GB disk space for O/S use, we are left with 14GB RAM and 90GB disk space for our virtual machines.

The maximum users I will host on this server is therefore: 28 (512MB RAM, 0MB swap, 3GB disk space). I’m selling that at a minimum of £9.99 (incl VAT or £8.32 net) per VPS but normally £19.99¹ (net) as a managed service.

At the minimum of £8.32 I stand to generate £232.96 in revenue. Subtract £64.99 for the server (SP 2011 SSD) + £15 for professional usage + £34.99 for 32IPs (RIPE block) over 12 month £2.91 per month, you end up with a total figure of £82.90 net in costs vs £232.96 in income, leaving you with £150.06 net profit.

That sounds good until you add support costs, Paypal charges and other business overheads to that and you pretty much break even depending what customers you have and how much support you are likely to have to give. Plus I spend a fair bit of time improving the software configuration and staying well clear of overselling anything.

£150.06 divided by 28 customers is just £5.36 profit per customer per month. If you set £15² per hour as your base rate, and you just spend a smidgen over 21 minutes dealing with requests every month you start loosing money. Now 21 minutes per customer is quite a lot but if they are having a problem you haven’t seen before you end up spending hours tracking stuff down.

It’s important to remember this folks, otherwise you look at your bank balance and think ‘sweet!’ but work your butt off every day for treading water instead of growing your business. Good support takes time and costs money. It makes customers happy so they stay with you but it is not growing your business (much).

£150.06 net is not to be sniffed at though because at least you are breaking even and can start growing your business. Once you have enough experience, scripts and customers you can start renting more servers and reduce the costs base at some point.

Sadly more servers and more customers mean more support and more overheads, so you will be relegated to watching your margins very carefully and spending more time in spreadsheets than hacking code or getting creative with designing websites!

1 | A managed service means I look after the core software running in the virtual machine. Operating system and software updates, making sure the firewall is doing its job, checking for abuse and malware. Generally an hours work per machine per month.

If all customers were using this service, I’d stand to generate £559.44 in revenue with around £82.90 a month in costs, that’s a nice little profit of £476.54 for 28 hours of work a month. Or just over £17 an hour profit (before tax and other business costs).

2 | You should calculate your hourly rate based on all the costs factors in your business, not what you think you should charge, to calculate this figure properly! I simply wanted to illustrate a point here. Take into account you might need to hire somebody else to look after support, you start loosing money very quickly unless you up your monthly charges or do what a lot of other hosts do and charge per incident (eg. £10 per support ticket outside basic support, some call this ‘remote hands’).

A final thought

I’m firmly looking to stay small and offer vps / web hosting as a ‘valued added service’ in addition to my core service of designing successful websites for freelancers and small businesses. I could raise prices for hosting to recoup some money for managing the hosting side but as long as my costs are covered and I can asure a dependable, speedy service than I shall be happy

Other articles in this series

Related posts in this (little) series:

• How to: Testing Nginx with APC, Varnish, WordPress and W3 Cache on a 128MB VPS
• How to: Install Nginx with APC, Varnish, WordPress and W3 Cache on a 128MB VPS
• How to: Benchmark Nginx and Varnish for a WordPress Site
• How to: Make Money from Offering VPS Hosting

What are you doing for a living? How are you using this little tutorial? Let me know and leave me your comments below or drop me a tweet.

Special Offer Get a VPS with 512MB RAM and 3GB disk space for just £9.99 inclusive of VAT!

Subscription via PayPal; no minimum term; VPS created within 12 hours of payment made; service provided by Brighter Computing Ltd; terms and conditions / AUP apply; VAT receipts provided automatically

If you don’t have it installed already, then get apache2-utils to run the benchmark tool:

apt-get install apache2-utils

To test nginx+fpm only, we need to send requests to port 8080:

ab -kc 10 -n 1000 http://localhost:8080/

To test varnish we need port 80:

ab -kc 10 -n 1000 http://localhost:80/

Comparison of the two give us (in my case anyway) the following results. Please note this is all run locally and I have SSD drives.

Yes, we are cheating here. Varnish is delivering static content back and it’s all requested locally not from another machine outside the network. Anyway, the whole point of this set-up is to make our dynamic website be as static as possible whilst remaining dynamic (er- you what?).

APC, memcached and the use of W3 Cache all help to reduce the amount of hard work our system has to do to deliver the same bit of content to the visitor. We are not talking about web-apps but a run of the mill WordPress powered site here. Varnish helps to reduce the work load even further and the above table is proof that a reverse proxying cache is the single piece of software that makes or breaks your performance.

Put Cloudflare in front of that and see how little bandwidth your website suddenly requires and how blazingly fast it is all of a sudden! Notice how little resources you can do without. Save your pennies for running a VPS host server instead.

Look out for another post with more benchmark information and more exhaustive tests. For example, I will test Cloudflare vs direct (varnish & nginx) from remote.

Other articles in this series

Related posts in this (little) series:

• How to: Testing Nginx with APC, Varnish, WordPress and W3 Cache on a 128MB VPS
• How to: Install Nginx with APC, Varnish, WordPress and W3 Cache on a 128MB VPS
• How to: Benchmark Nginx and Varnish for a WordPress Site
• How to: Make Money from Offering VPS Hosting

What are you doing for a living? How are you using this little tutorial? Let me know and leave me your comments below or drop me a tweet.

Special Offer Get a VPS with 512MB RAM and 3GB disk space for just £9.99 inclusive of VAT!

Subscription via PayPal; no minimum term; VPS created within 12 hours of payment made; service provided by Brighter Computing Ltd; terms and conditions / AUP apply; VAT receipts provided automatically

Introduction

The purpose of this tutorial is to configure a single VPS with 128MB RAM to provide hosting for a single WordPress website by using Nginx as a webserver, MySQL as a database server, PHP-FPM as a fastCGI server, APC as an optcode cache, Varnish as a caching proxy and vsFTPd as a secure FTP server (optional step). I also use openSSH/SCP as the primary means to access the VPS with.

When I write [HOSTNAME] please subsitute everything (incl the brackets) with your hostname (eg. www.example.org).

When I write [USER] please subsitute it (incl the brackets) with your username (eg. example).

In fact, anything [something] please replace with your own values! (eg. [YourPassword]).

I’m running this on my new dedicated server running Proxmox (1.8) with kernel 2.6.32-4-pve and an openVZ debian 6 (32bit) guest, at 128MB RAM and 0MB swap*. This server is running on SSD’s (solid state disks). Running on SSD’s is really nice especially for high iops required to run a VM host.

*) Swap in an openVZ virtual machine is just memory, so 128 RAM + 128 swap would simply mean 256M overall memory. There is no difference. Hence why I just set RAM and not swap for openVZ vms.

Disclaimer

In case you don’t have this set-up, please be aware that you may not get this to work. Caveat emptor – your milage may vary. I suggest you run this on a test bed rather than anything you are using for production already! No warranties are given and no responsibility for time lost, and tears shed assumed. Now make a brew and let’s get on with the show.

Setting up the VPS

Removing stuff

Ref: http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/bootstraping-low-end-vps-with-pre-built-scripts/

We don’t really need rsyslog or portmap, so let’s remove them:

apt-get remove rsyslog portmap

Apt Sources

Adding dot-deb repo

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

echo deb http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all >> /etc/apt/sources.list
wget http://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg
cat dotdeb.gpg | apt-key add -

Adding main debian repos

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

echo deb http://mirror.positive-internet.com/debian/ squeeze main non-free contrib >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo deb-src http://mirror.positive-internet.com/debian/ squeeze main non-free contrib >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main >>/etc/apt/sources.list
echo deb http://mirror.positive-internet.com/debian/ squeeze-updates main >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo deb-src http://mirror.positive-internet.com/debian/ squeeze-updates main >> /etc/apt/sources.list

Updating

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Adding base

apt-get install mc sudo iptables curl lsb-release

Adding Varnish repo

Ref: https://www.varnish-cache.org/installation/debian

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

curl http://repo.varnish-cache.org/debian/GPG-key.txt | apt-key add -
echo "deb http://repo.varnish-cache.org/debian/ $(lsb_release -s -c) varnish-3.0" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/varnish.list
apt-get update
apt-get install varnish

Adding a system user

adduser [USER]

Don’t forget to give your user a password, a strong one preferably.

Add user to sudo

visudo

– find:

root (ALL)

– add below:

[User] (ALL) ALL

Change SSH conf

mcedit /etc/ssh/sshd_config

–find:

PermitRootLogin yes

–change to:

PermitRootLogin no

–find:

X11Forwarding yes

–change to:

X11Forwarding no

–find:

Port 22

–change to:

7742

–add to end:

UseDNS no

service ssh restart

Now open a new terminal and connect to your VPS using the username you have chosen and make sure you are connecting to port 7742 and not the default 22! Once logged on, we can continue our journey with installing some software.

Installing Software

apt-get install nginx mysql-server mysql-client memcached php5 php-apc php-auth php-net-smtp php-net-socket php-pear php5-curl php5-gd php5-mcrypt php5-mysql php5-fpm php5-memcached php5-tidy vsftpd

Yes, it was as easy as that! Provided you answered ‘yes’ to the question whether you wanted to install the above and their dependencies, you are now almost done.

Configuring services

OK, I was lying. You are nowhere near done but it’s as good a time as any to make a fresh brew before we dive into configuring our services.

In this section we are setting up the following software:

• MySQL
• Nginx
• PHP5
• APC
• FPM
• memcache
• Varnish
• vsFTPd

Configuring MySql

References:
- Reducing MySQL Memory Usage for Low End Boxes
http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/reducing-mysql-memory-usage-for-low-end-boxes/

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

mv /etc/mysql/my.cnf /etc/mysql/my.cnf.org
mcedit /etc/mysql/my.cnf

–insert:

[client]
port = 3306
socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
[mysqld]
user = mysql
pid-file = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid
socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
port = 3306
basedir = /usr
datadir = /var/lib/mysql
tmpdir = /tmp
language = /usr/share/mysql/english
skip-external-locking
bind-address = 127.0.0.1
thread_stack = 192K
myisam-recover = BACKUP
expire_logs_days = 10
max_binlog_size = 100M
bulk_insert_buffer_size = 8M
connect_timeout=10
interactive_timeout=50
join_buffer=1M
key_buffer=16K
max_allowed_packet=1M
table_cache = 4
max_connect_errors=10
max_connections=100
max_heap_table_size = 8M
myisam_sort_buffer_size=8M
query_cache_limit = 4M
query_cache_size = 250M
query_cache_type = 1
query_prealloc_size = 65K
query_alloc_block_size = 128K
read_buffer_size=1M
read_rnd_buffer_size=768K
record_buffer=1M
safe-show-database
skip-innodb
skip-locking
skip-networking
sort_buffer=64K
thread_cache_size=1024
thread_concurrency=8
tmp_table_size = 32M
wait_timeout=500
[mysqldump]
quick
max_allowed_packet = 16M
[mysql]
no-auto-rehash
[mysqld_safe]
socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
nice = -5
open_files_limit = 8192
[isamchk]
key_buffer = 8M
sort_buffer = 8M
read_buffer = 4M
write_buffer = 4M
!includedir /etc/mysql/conf.d/

Configuring nginx

References:
- nginx wordpress config
http://wiki.nginx.org/Wordpress
- Nginx + PHP-FPM + MySql + APC + WordPress
http://shortbutuseful.com/88/install-nginx-phpfpm-mysql-apc-wordpress-debian-6/
- Optimizing WordPress with Nginx, Varnish, APC, W3 Total Cache, and Amazon S3
http://danielmiessler.com/blog/optimizing-wordpress-with-nginx-varnish-w3-total-cache-amazon-s3-and-memcached

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

mv /etc/nginx/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.org
mcedit /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

–insert:

user www-data;
worker_processes 1;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
use epoll;
worker_connections 512;
multi_accept on;
}
http {
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay on;
keepalive_timeout 3;
server_tokens off;
access_log off;
client_max_body_size 32m;
client_body_timeout 60;
client_header_timeout 60;
send_timeout 60;
reset_timedout_connection on;

# If using Cloudflare, uncomment the following to get proper originating IPs
#set_real_ip_from   204.93.240.0/24;
#set_real_ip_from   204.93.177.0/24;
#set_real_ip_from   199.27.128.0/21;
#set_real_ip_from 173.245.48.0/20;
#set_real_ip_from 103.22.200.0/22;
#set_real_ip_from 141.101.64.0/18;
#real_ip_header   CF-Connecting-IP;
# end Cloudflare

gzip on;
gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6].(?!.*SV1)";
gzip_vary on;
gzip_static on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 9;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

mv /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-available/default.org
mcedit /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

–insert:

upstream php { server 127.0.0.1:9000; }
server {
listen 8080; ## listen for ipv4; this line is default and implied
#listen [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6
root /home/[USER]/www;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
server_name [HOSTNAME];
location / {
root /home/[USER]/www/;
index index index.php;
try_files $uri/ $uri /index.php?q=$uri&amp&$args;
port_in_redirect off;
}
location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|xml)$ {
access_log off;
log_not_found off;
expires max;
root /home/[USER]/www/;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
#NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini
fastcgi_pass php;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /home/[USER]/www/$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
fastcgi_ignore_client_abort off;
fastcgi_connect_timeout 60;
fastcgi_send_timeout 360;
fastcgi_read_timeout 360;
fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
fastcgi_buffers 8 256k;
fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
}
location ~ /.htaccess { deny all; log_not_found off; access_log off; }
location ~ /.htpasswd { deny all; log_not_found off; access_log off; }
location = /favicon.ico { allow all; log_not_found off; access_log off; }
location = /robots.txt { allow all; log_not_found off; access_log off; }
}

Fix CGI Path Info

mcedit /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini

–find:

cgi.fix_pathinfo

Uncomment the command by removing the ; in front and replace the defauly 1 with a 0!

Configuring PHP5-FPM

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

mv /etc/php5/fpm/php-fpm.conf /etc/php5/fpm/php-fpm.conf.org
mcedit /etc/php5/fpm/php-fpm.conf

–insert:

[global]
pid = /var/run/php5-fpm.pid
error_log = /var/log/php5-fpm.log
log_level = notice
emergency_restart_threshold = 5
emergency_restart_interval = 2
process_control_timeout = 2
daemonize = yes
include=/etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/*.conf

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

mv /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf.org
mcedit /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

–insert:

[www]
;prefix = /path/to/pools/$pool
listen = 127.0.0.1:9000
listen.backlog = -1
listen.allowed_clients = 127.0.0.1
listen.owner = [USER]
listen.group = [USER]
listen.mode = 0666
user = [USER]
group = [USER]
pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 15
pm.start_servers = 5
pm.min_spare_servers = 2
pm.max_spare_servers = 10
pm.max_requests = 0
pm.status_path = /fpmstatus
ping.path = /ping
ping.response = pong
request_terminate_timeout = 10
request_slowlog_timeout = 10
slowlog = /var/log/$pool.log.slow
;rlimit_files = 1024
;rlimit_core = 0
;chroot =
;chdir = /
catch_workers_output = yes
env[HOSTNAME] = $HOSTNAME
env[PATH] = /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
env[TMP] = /tmp
env[TMPDIR] = /tmp
env[TEMP] = /tmp
;php_admin_value[sendmail_path] = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -f www@my.domain.com
php_flag[display_errors] = off
php_admin_value[error_log] = /var/log/fpm-php.www.log
php_admin_flag[log_errors] = on
php_admin_value[memory_limit] = 32M
php_admin_value[date.timezone] = Europe/London
php_value[upload_max_filesize] = 10M
php_value[max_execution_time] = 120

Configuring Varnish

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

mv /etc/default/varnish /etc/varnish/default_old
mcedit /etc/default/varnish

–insert:

START=yes
NFILES=131072
MEMLOCK=82000
DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80 \
-T localhost:6082 \
-f /etc/varnish/default.vcl \
-S /etc/varnish/secret \
-s malloc,1G"

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

mv /etc/varnish/default.vcl /etc/varnish/default.vcl.org
mcedit /etc/varnish/default.vcl

–insert:

backend default { .host = "localhost"; .port = "8080"; }
acl purge { "localhost"; }
sub vcl_recv { if (req.request == "PURGE") { if (!client.ip ~ purge) { error 405 "Not allowed."; } return(lookup); }
if (req.url ~ "^/$") { unset req.http.cookie; } }
sub vcl_hit { if (req.request == "PURGE") { set obj.ttl = 0s; error 200 "Purged."; } }
sub vcl_miss { if (req.request == "PURGE") { error 404 "Not in cache."; }
if (!(req.url ~ "wp-(login|admin)")) { unset req.http.cookie; }
if (req.url ~ "^/[^?]+.(jpeg|jpg|png|gif|ico|js|css|txt|gz|zip|lzma|bz2|tgz|tbz|html|htm)(\?.|)$") {
unset req.http.cookie;
set req.url = regsub(req.url, "\?.$", "");
}
if (req.url ~ "^/$") { unset req.http.cookie; } }
sub vcl_fetch { if (req.url ~ "^/$") { unset beresp.http.set-cookie; }
if (!(req.url ~ "wp-(login|admin)")) { unset beresp.http.set-cookie; }}

Configuring vsftpd (optional)

I’m using vsftpd to provide a secure means of accessing the server which is bound to the system user, locked to their home directory and can only be accessed using TLS encryption. Access is also provided via SCP (SSH) of course but most people use sFTP still and there are a good few apps for iOS (etc) devices that only support (s)FTP rather than SSH/SCP. Feel free to omit this step if you don’t need FTP!

Ref: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=518293

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

mv /etc/vsftpd.conf /etc/vsftpd.conf.org
mcedit /etc/vsftpd.conf

–insert:

listen=YES
anonymous_enable=NO
local_enable=YES
write_enable=YES
dirmessage_enable=YES
use_localtime=YES
xferlog_enable=YES
connect_from_port_20=YES
idle_session_timeout=600
data_connection_timeout=120
nopriv_user=ftp
#ascii_upload_enable=YES
#ascii_download_enable=YES
chroot_local_user=YES
chroot_list_enable=NO
secure_chroot_dir=/var/run/vsftpd/empty
pam_service_name=vsftpd
rsa_cert_file=/etc/ssl/private/vsftpd.pem
userlist_deny=NO
userlist_enable=YES
userlist_file=/etc/vsftpd.allowed_users
ssl_enable=YES
allow_anon_ssl=NO
force_local_data_ssl=YES
force_local_logins_ssl=YES
ssl_tlsv1=YES
ssl_sslv2=NO
ssl_sslv3=NO
force_dot_files=YES
max_per_ip=2
max_clients=20
pasv_min_port=12000
pasv_max_port=12100
require_ssl_reuse=NO

echo [USER] >> /etc/vsftpd.allowed_users

Enabling SSL

Ref: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/configure-vsfptd-secure-connections-via-ssl-tls.html

/usr/bin/openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:1024 -keyout /etc/ssl/private/vsftpd.pem -out /etc/ssl/private/vsftpd.pem

Configure your SSL as you please. Eg. Country code ‘GB’, location ‘London’, name [yourhostname]

Installing WordPress

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

Become the user, go into the web root in its home directory we created earlier. Then download, unpack and move wordpress files into place. Lastly we remove the wordpress directory.

su [USER]
cd /home/[USER]/www
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -zxvf latest.tar.gz
mv wordpress/* /home/[USER]/www/
rmdir wordpress

Creating a database for WordPress

Each line represents a separate command to be executed in sequence!

mysql -uroot -p
CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO admin@localhost IDENTIFIED BY '[YOUR_PASSWORD]' WITH GRANT OPTION;
quit

Securing your VPS

I’m using Iptables as my firewall here. Note that blocking port 9000 (our PHP FPM) you will get Bad Gateway errors! There’s probably room for improvement here but for now adding the port to the allowed rules fixes this.

// Show what is loaded in our firewall

iptables -L

// Flush everything we have in our firewall

iptables -F

// Allow established sessions

iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

or

iptables -A INPUT -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

// Allow services

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 7742 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 8080 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 9000 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 21 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 12000:12100 -j ACCEPT

// End iptables by blocking everything that we didn’t explicitly allowed earlier

iptables -A INPUT -j DROP

// backup iptables to a file

iptables-save > /home/[USER]/iptables.rules

// to restore our rules

iptables-restore > /home/[USER]/iptables.rules

Making sure iptables rules are reloaded on reboot
Ref: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/445

mcedit /etc/network/if-up.d/iptables

–insert:

#!/bin/sh
iptables-restore < /home/[USER]/iptables.rules

chmod +x /etc/network/if-up.d/iptables

Reboot to make sure it is working (iptables -L)

Starting and stopping our services

Since I’m a lazy sysadmin I like to use scripts to help me do as little as possible. Here are two very simple scripts, not even very good ones, but one starts all services and the other stops them.

The Stop Script

mcedit stopscript.sh

–insert:

#!/bin/bash
service mysql stop
service memcached stop
service varnish stop
service nginx stop
service cron stop
service postfix stop
service vsftpd stop
/etc/init.d/php5-fpm stop

The Start Script

mcedit startscript.sh

–insert:

#!/bin/bash
service mysql start
service memcached start
service varnish start
service nginx start
service cron start
service postfix start
service vsftpd start
/etc/init.d/php5-fpm start

Note that Varnish prefers to be started before nginx for some reason, although the ports are different.

Chmodding +x the scripts will make them executable, which is handy for scripts ;o

chmod +x startscript.sh stopscript.sh

Run the scripts and have a look

sudo ./stopscript.sh

Sudo is important as we need superuser powers to mess with services! If all goes well you should see output from the commands in the terminal. Check to see stuff really is not running by issuing the following:

ps aux

Once satisfied all is off you may like to find out how little (or much) memory you are using:

free -m

Great, let’s start everything and do this again:

sudo ./startscript.sh
ps aux
free -m

Again you should have seen services starting, ps aux will show you what’s running and free -m will let you know how much memory is being used.

Problems

To see what’s running on which port:

netstat -tulpn

For some weird reason I have to stop nginx, then start varnish and then start nginx again as varnish will otherwise refuse to bind to port 80 despite nginx running on 8080! This is taken into account in my start/stop scripts above.

Closing Notes

Exim Installation and Configuration on Debian

May I point you in the general direction of an excellent how-to guide written by Phil Paradis over Linode?

Link: http://library.linode.com/email/exim/send-only-mta-debian-5-lenny
http://library.linode.com/email/exim/send-only-mta-debian-6-squeeze

You may have to do this:

apt-get install exim4-base exim4-config

then

apt-get install exim4-daemon-light

and lastly

dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

Thanks to Dleonard0 (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=10411454&postcount=4)

To test your set-up you probably need something like the mail command or in fact mailx:

apt-get install bsd-mailx

This will enable you to do this:

echo "This is a test." | mail -s Testing [your email address]

Check what’s happening with:

mailq

Free Memory

Without nginx, php-fpm, mysql, memcached, varnish, vsftpd, cron, and postfix running the vps consumes ~14MB. Running are bash, ssh, iptables, and atd. Please note this is with a single active user session.

Using a different virtualisation technique these results may differ.

Also, using a more lightweight ssh server (like dropbear) will also save you some RAM.

I have 128MB in total, of which 14MB are used with just the bear neccesities running. This is our baseline.

With all services, but vsftpd running and one user accessing the wordpress powered website, the memory usage figures are somewhat higher.

Throwing vsftpd into the mix we end up roughly the same figure, give or take an MB or two.

Script to show memory usage

I just recently came across a very handy script written by Draig Brady at pixelbeat.org, that shows memory usage per program in Linux. You can find it on his website. Note that this script shows usage per program, not per process.

wget http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ps_mem.py
chmod +x ps_mem.py
sudo ./ps_mem.py

The APT problem

This looks OK but sadly APT and Aptitude are consuming a lot of memory doing their stuff when updating and installing software. Especially Aptitude is eating a lot. (ref: http://blog.aplikacja.info/2009/12/aptitude-vs-apt-get-memory-usage-on-debian/)

There appears to be no way to tweak this other than installing packages manually. However, I rather bump up my VPS memory to 256 or 512MB than having to maintain things by hand the old fashioned (and more efficient way). Call me lazy but time is money ;D

Conclusions

In closing, yes you can run this all quite nicely on a small low end box but expect to work on it a lot harder, whether it’s tweaking settings or maintaining software, it’s great fun. If you really must have the smallest VPS and ignore APT then install from source and sort out dependencies manually.

However, if you are running a business like me, then spending a wee bit more a month on a slightly larger VPS and perhaps selecting a host that doesn’t have ‘rock bottom’ pricing but offers a little more help, makes a a more sensible choice.

Shameless self promotion

If you like, I have this VPS ready made for you to move in to and even configure it to suit your details (username, hostname, passwords). The latter which I suggest you change upon first login of course. A 128MB openVZ container as described here with 3GB space (extendible within reason free of charge!) can be yours for a token amount of just £9.99 including VAT (£8.32 exclusive).

Drop me an email stating ‘WordPress VPS’ in the subject line and the link to this post to get one today!

Small Print

Payment is via Paypal (monthly subscription) and you will get a proper VAT invoice from my UK LTD company. Support is via email, Skype, IM (various) or the old fashioned way by phone during business hours and via email at all other times. I promise to respond to your enquiries within the hour during business hours.

The price includes the (extortionate) charges PayPal levvies but it’s the simplest way to get things done.

There are no bandwidth restrictions as such and I encourage you to make use of Cloudflare’s excellent and free (as in beer) service to help reduce wastage. Your VPS shares a metred 100Mbit connection. The server is based in France and is hosted by OVH. It has 16GB of RAM and 120GB of SSD space in total which is shared amongst everyone. Most VPSs are my web design customers and I like to keep an eye out to make sure everybody receives the best service possible.

For other restrictions please see OVH’s terms as they will block the whole server if one customer is found in violation of them. Hence why I make sure this doesn’t happen by reserving the right to refuse service to anyone who I find might not play by the rules.

Other articles in this series

Related posts in this (little) series:

• How to: Testing Nginx with APC, Varnish, WordPress and W3 Cache on a 128MB VPS
• How to: Install Nginx with APC, Varnish, WordPress and W3 Cache on a 128MB VPS
• How to: Benchmark Nginx and Varnish for a WordPress Site
• How to: Make Money from Offering VPS Hosting

What are you doing for a living? How are you using this little tutorial? Let me know and leave me your comments below or drop me a tweet.

Special Offer Get a VPS with 512MB RAM and 3GB disk space for just £9.99 inclusive of VAT!

Subscription via PayPal; no minimum term; VPS created within 12 hours of payment made; service provided by Brighter Computing Ltd; terms and conditions / AUP apply; VAT receipts provided automatically

Running an OpenSource project? Get a FREE SSL certificate from GoDaddy!

Step 1: Generate a ssl certificate (key) and certificate request (csr)

Ref: GoDaddy Help – Generating a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) – Apache 2.x

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout [yourname].key -out [yourname].csr

Step 2: Filling out your new SSL certificate key details

Ref: GoDaddy Help – Generating a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) – Apache 2.x

Common Name

the domain name you want your SSL certificate to validate for.

WARNING: www.example.com != example.com. Select this carefully! For example, my mail server has the following hostname: mail.brightercomputing.net, so the Common Name (CN) is mail.brightercomputing.net. This means the SSL certificate will only ever work with this and not www.brightercomputing.net.

Organisation

what ever you want; I use my business name Brighter Computing Ltd

Organisation Unit

doesn’t really matter; I use simply IT

Email

I use my support email address help@brightercomputing.com to capture any enquiries

City / Locality

pick a place; I use London

pick what is closest or where your server is; I use London again

Country

make sure to pick the right country code! I use GB since I’m in the UK. UK is not a valid code!

Passphrase

WARNING: make sure to leave the passphrase field empty, as you will otherwise have to log-on to your server and hack in your passphrase three times over when restarting services or your server!

Step 3: Submit csr and await signed key

When using GoDaddy you should log-on to your account and head over to the SSL Certificate section and its manager page.

The way GoDaddy work is that you first purchase your SSL certificate and get issued with a credit. You need to log-on and use that credit to get an SSL certificate. Before you can submit your CSR you need to wait a short while for GoDaddy’s scripts to sort themselves out.

Once you have redeemed your credit it will simply say ‘New Certificate’ in the list. Click on the entry next to it that reads ‘Manage Certificate’ once it is ready (it may say “Status: Initialize SSL Certificate” for a good while, so grab a snickers(tm) and make yourself a brew).

WARNING: you need to make sure you receive emails for what ever email you registered yourdomain.com under! Check the WHOIS entry for it before you submit to GoDaddy as they will send you an email to confirm you are the owner of the domain. You will need to click on the confirmation link they send you before proceeding.

Step 4: Copy the received files to your server

gd_bundle.crt
[yourname].crt (the actual certificate)

Step 5: Moving files into place

Copy both gd_bundle.crt and [yourname].crt to

/etc/ssl/certs/

Copy the [yourname].key you created earlier to

/etc/ssl/private/

Step 6: Edit the following files

Find and replace:

a) Apache (Webserver)

/etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl

SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/[yourname].crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/[yourname].key
SSLCACertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/gd_bundle.crt

b) Dovecot (IMAP/POP Server)

/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf

ssl_key_file = /etc/ssl/private/[yourname].key
ssl_cert_file = /etc/ssl/certs/[yourname].crt
ssl_ca_file = /etc/ssl/certs/gd_bundle.crt

c) Postfix (SMTP Server)

/etc/postfix/main.cf

smtpd_tls_key_file = /etc/ssl/private/[yourname].key
smtpd_tls_cert_file = /etc/ssl/certs/[yourname].crt
smtpd_tls_CAfile = /etc/ssl/certs/gd_bundle.crt

Step 7: Restart all three services

service apache2 restart
service dovecot restart
service postfix restart

Step 8: Testing things work

Load your webmail client via https (after you have cleared your cache and history) and notice that there are no errors anymore!

Access your email via IMAP/POP client (eg. Thunderbird) and send a test mail to somewhere. Make sure you select something like STARTTLS for encryption to actually see whether it’s working.

When sending and receiving you should now no longer receive any more warnings.

Unless of course you made a mistake somewhere

Have a nice day.

Epilogue

I’m running my iRedMail server on my Promox VM host in an OpenVZ container (virtual machine) with 30GB space and 2GB RAM. It’s plenty for my purposes. Make sure to have enough disk space available when running lot’s of mailboxes and use quotas.

Also, be prepared to increase the memory (RAM) especially as Apache2 can be a memory hog. Processing large volumes of mail also requires a fair bit of memory and speedy disks. Last but not least do yourself a favour and use a backup MX (mail server) in case your box goes down!

Oh and don’t forget to set a reverse DNS entry for your hostname too.

Offer: Get a ready-made iRedMail Server, with 1 year GoDaddy certificate for just £59.99 (net) a month!

Dedicated server (Intel Core2Duo, 2.33GHZ per core) with 4GB RAM, 750GB (s/RAID 1), 10TB traffic per month (100Mbps port), and 4 IPv4 addresses.

No minimum contract terms. Friendly and dedicated support (email, Skype, IM, IRC). Prices exclude VAT at 20% UK rate.

Call Brighter Computing on +44 1908 90 49 90 or email axel@brightercomputing.com, quoting this article as reference.

Over on brighterComputing.com, the main company website for Brighter Computing Ltd, I will focus on providing computer help to people and businesses in Milton Keynes and London (and anywhere in between).

New services include a personal computer shopper that helps you get the computer or gadget that’s right for you, at the best price and set-up to suit you.

All existing services such as Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting, domain name registration and management, online privacy and security, computer refurbishments, backup and archiving solutions, and CAT5/6 network installations continue to be offered of course.

Have a look at the new brighterComputing.com website and let me know what you think via Twitter (@brightertweets) or directly on the new Facebook page (http://fb.brightercomputing.com).

The two new sections are (as you may have guessed) web design and videos. To start off the latter, I have added the recently shot videos for Lydia Baylis and the latest website I designed for Lucerne Clinic in Notting Hill.

Please have a look and let me know what you think by posting your comments below.

After following various tutorials and picking certain peoples brains, I think I finally have arrived at the bees knees as they say (or do they?)!

The configuration

The dream config breaks down as follows:

• 128MB VPS (Virtualbox for testing, KVM or XEN for production
• Debian 6 (Squeeze)
• PHP5 with FPM (via dotdeb)
• Nginx web server
• APC Optcode cache
• Varnish Caching Proxy
• WordPress with W3 Cache plug-in
• and for good measure Cloudflare CDN/Proxy

I will write up an easy to follow, cut-and-past tutorial soon – promise! And publish my script once it’s done and working. Until then, please check out the following comparison between Nginx+Varnish and Nginx without Varnish. The difference is clear!

This is with WP (latest) and W3 Cache active, running on APC with browser caching.

The test were run with Apache Bench (apt-get install apache2-utils).

Nginx (with APC & W3C)

ab -kc 10 -n 1000 http://localhost:8080/

This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms - milliseconds)
50% 405
66% 417
75% 424
80% 428
90% 444
95% 459
98% 484
99% 496
100% 534 (longest request)


Nginx and Varnish (with APC & W3C)

ab -kc 10 -n 1000 http://localhost/

This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms - milliseconds )
50% 1
66% 1
75% 2
80% 2
90% 2
95% 3
98% 19
99% 1137
100% 1139 (longest request)


Summary

On its own Nginx (with APC and W3C) takes 40s to run a test with 1000 requests. With Varnish in front of it is only takes 1.2s to serve the same number!

On its own Nginx will handle 24.52 requests per second, whereas with Varnish in front it will handle 769.98!

On its own Nginx will transfer 6.30 Kbytes/sec with Varnish it will push 4,827.39 Kbytes/sec!

The majority of requests (90%) were served within 444ms with just nginx but just 2ms with varnish. This is from localhost of course.

Now imagine the whole thing protected and CDN’d by Cloudflare and you got yourself a website that can truly fly.

Cushty! ;D

PS: Thanks to Daniel Miesler’s post for inspiration. There are more people to thank but I’ll save that until the next post.

Coming Soon

Related posts in this (little) series:

• How to: Testing Nginx with APC, Varnish, WordPress and W3 Cache on a 128MB VPS
• How to: Install Nginx with APC, Varnish, WordPress and W3 Cache on a 128MB VPS
• How to: Benchmark Nginx and Varnish for a WordPress Site
• How to: Make Money from Offering VPS Hosting

First of all Facebook accounts are for normal human beings and not intended to be used by brands, bands or companies and may be closed down at any time.

Secondly if you want to utilise Facebook to its fullest potential to promote yourself (or your clients), you are loosing out on a lot of features by not using the system correctly.

Thirdly…

Great features only available for Facebook Pages

Facebook Pages Insights

Facebook Insights are like Google Analytics, a tool to help you find out more about who accesses your page and a lot more details on other vital stats. Use this tool to find out what content is hot, how your page is doing overall and much more.

Add apps to your page

Like for normal users, you can add interactivity and engage more with your page visitors using apps. Either build your own or use one of the many readily available (eg. Twitter). Some apps work in slightly confusing ways – more about this later.

Add your own custom stuff as tabs

For example I regularly add subscription forms for artists mailing lists as a tab to my clients pages (eg. Love Amongst Ruin). You can pretty much add whatever you like as long as it is HTML, CSS and Javascript and doesn’t violate Facebook’s terms. Unlike MySpace, this give you great flexibility!

About Facebook Apps

Some apps, like Twitters, can be a bit daunting as they ask for permissions to authenticate with your personal accounts. Fret not! Any app needs to authenticate against a personal Facebook user account. If the app is written well, or specifically says it can be used on Pages, then you add the app to the pages once authorised.

To do cool things like publishing content from WordPress blogs for example, you first need to create an app on Facebook that handles the process via their API. Don’t worry about what that means, most plug-ins for publishing tools such as WordPress will walk you through this process very quickly. It’s not hard.

Shameless plug: If you rather had this taken care of by someone who knows his way around, give me a ring or drop me an email!

How to use Facebook Pages

Ok, to be fair that title is probably slightly not what you think as I’m not providing a manual here. You can find that over on Facebook Pages Help instead. However I will focus on the simple steps you should take to maximise your visibility.

Since Facebook specially designed their ‘Pages’ feature to be used by businesses or artists such as musicians, it is important to know how to get it right.

If you don’t already have a personal account on Facebook, go create one (in your own name)

Once you have done that, you can create Pages

Notice the different options you have and pick one that suits you best. Read the options and choices carefully!

For example there’s a massive difference between pages for communities (eg. like a charitable cause) or an official page for a product, service, company, brand name, band or artist (etc)! If you pick the wrong one, your page may be removed or not be found because it’s wrongly categorised. It’s hard to change that later (delete page, create new page = a lot of extra work).

References and Resoures

You can find out more here:

Official Facebook Pages page

http://www.facebook.com/FacebookPages

Create a page on Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Help page for Facebook Pages

http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=175

Facebook Page Administration (page)

http://www.facebook.com/pages/manage

List with all the pages available

http://www.facebook.com/pages/

Facebook Insights

http://www.facebook.com/insights/

Facebook Applications

http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php

Create Facebook Apps

http://www.facebook.com/developers/createapp.php

Your Facebook Apps (the ones you created!)

http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php

List of apps especially for Facebook Pages

http://www.facebook.com/apps/directory.php?app_type=5&category=0

Epilogue

I hope you found this ‘little’ guide and the links helpful and enjoyed reading. If so, please check out the links to FREE stuff on the right side (eg. FREE online backup space) or leave me a comment below. If you are too exhausted, you would make me happy by just hitting the ‘like’ button

If most of this still sounds like techno babble but you really want to make the most of your Facebook presence, why not get in touch and let me do it for you! I’m looking forward to helping you.

Folders to backup

Below is a list of folders I find important to backup. Yours may vary:

/var/backups

Some misc backups

/var/www

The web root for all sites

/etc

Since this contains all relevant config files, I want to back this up!

/home

All users home folders

The command

Here’s the rsync line I’m using to transfer multiple directories to the remote server in a single command:

rsync -avzR --log-file=/var/log/rsync.cron.log -e ssh /var/www /home /var/backups /etc 	[user]@[somedestination]:[remote_path]

Note the -R option here to allow us to list multiple directories in a single command. The -log-file option is for my own sanity and to track down any errors by logging rsync messages in a new log file.

Rsync options and explanations

Here’s an explanation of the various options I use (these are case-sensitive):

-a

archive mode

-v

verbose output (tell rsync to let me know what’s going on)

-z

compress file data during the transfer

-R

use relative paths

-e

specify the remote shell to use (in my case ssh)

More details and further options can be found on the rsync man page.

The video I recorded of Toy Horses live performance at the Monto Water Rats theatre in London on 2 November 2010 is now available on Vimeo (and soon on YouTube) in beautiful HD (720p25). Despite the horrible (low) lighting and extreme sound environment, I think these videos will get across Toy Horses musical performance rather nicely. But please, judge for yourself

In case you _don’t_ see the Vimeo videos below, please have a look at the Toy Horses at the Water Rats video album directly.

Visit www.toyhorsesmusic.com for more.

• Client: The Amorphous Androgynous / FSOL
• Website: www.amorphousandrogynous.com
• Online Profiles: Twitter, MySpace, Facebook
• Type: Web Design, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook Profiles
• Brief: Create a new design for The Amorphous Androgynous webpage, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace profiles; to coincide with their latest release “A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In Your Mind Vol. 3″. Also create relevant artwork for online promotion (eg. banner ads).