Server Admin – Page 3

Jul 22

Cloudflare and Google Crawl

Within days of Implementing cloudflare, Google crawl stats plummeted across all my sites using cloudflare CDN.
And the following line appeared in Google webmasters tools

Your site has been assigned special crawl rate settings. You will not be able to change the crawl rate.

Things were quickly back to normal once cloudflare was removed.

Crawling plummeted and taking twice much time downloading page.

Hits from Google bots were also down.

Although Cloudflare did helped a lot with server load and I was able to pull a seamless server move with zero downtime.

I’ll monitoring stats for sites still on cloudflare and hope things will improve.

Jul 22

Move servers with Zero downtime using cloudflare

By Dhillon Server Admin 2 Comments

(A) Few days before moving your site to the new server, implement cloudflare on your site. (i.e if you are not already using it)

http://www.cloudflare.com/

Its free and the process is pretty straightforward.

Switch to Cloudflare nameservers and wait for 2-3 days for DNS propagation.

(B) Move your site to new server.
database driven sites (wordpress, vbulletin) should be put into read only mode before moving.

(C) Update cloudflare DNS settings to reflect the IP of your new server.

After that if you do not wish to use cloudflare just update nameservers at your domain registrants but DO NOT delete domain from cloudflare

Jul 22

Disable error_log and access_log in Apache

By Dhillon Server Admin No Comments

If you know what you are doing and have a pretty good reason to do it, this is one way to do it.

ln -fs /dev/null /etc/httpd/logs/access_log ln -fs /dev/null /etc/httpd/logs/error_log

the command will clear the content of the files and create a junction to “/dev/null”. All further logs will be sent to blackhole (discarded).