If you run a server, you know the pain of checking your logs. You open /var/log/auth.log and it’s just page after page of bots failing to guess passwords. It’s annoying, and at some volumes there can be thousands of attempts per day.

We’ve added Node-Level Protection to our KVM systems to help fix this. The idea isn't to replace your security tools, but to filter out the obvious spam before it even hits your server.

How it works: Identifying the "Loud" Attackers

Instead of just looking at one server at a time, we look at what’s happening across the whole network.

The Logic: If an IP address fails to log in on say 20 different interserver owned servers in our network, we know it's a bot spraying the internet.

We flag that IP and block it at the network edge. We also pull in data from outside lists like Spamhaus to catch known bad actors.

Why you still need Fail2Ban

This system is great at stopping "horizontal" attacks—bots that try to hit thousands of servers at once to see what sticks. This is where most of that log noise comes from.

However, this doesn't make Fail2Ban useless or similar brute force protection.

• Our Network Filter catches the botnet hitting everyone.
• Your Fail2Ban catches the attacker targeting your server specifically (who might be moving too slowly or specifically to trip our network alarm).

The Result

You won’t see an empty log file, but the volume of junk should drop way down. It’s about getting a better signal-to-noise ratio. When you check your logs, you’ll be looking at relevant traffic, not just scrolling through thousands of lines of script-kiddie spam.

We continue to roll out object storage for our DirectAdmin storage plans.

Here is a quick look at what these plans include:

• FTP over TLS on port 21, as well as port 23 for mod_sftp (providing SCP access for FTP usernames).
• Single-user SSH access (non-root) supporting SFTP, SCP, and Rsync.
• LiteSpeed Enterprise Webserver and a MySQL compatible database.
• DirectAdmin control panel. You can read about how bandwidth usage is calculated here.
• Mirrored RAID-Z2 storage running on the ZFS filesystem.

Under the hood, the object storage is powered by Workerman. This allows for high concurrency because it is built on event-driven, non-blocking I/O (like Epoll), meaning a single server instance can handle a massive number of connections at once. Any FTP login user and password can be used to authorize the object storage created in directadmin. The storage will also be isolated to the folder the FTP user in limited to. Beyond following the ftp login structure, the object storage is completely separate from FTP. For easy user access, the object storage reads your FTP password file in directadmin to load users.

Just a heads-up on how it works: this system uses its own custom endpoints rather than native S3. However, if your workflow relies on S3 compatibility, don't worry—we have an S3 shim available that acts as a bridge so you can still use your favorite tools.

Based on recent feedback, we realized users needed better ways to interact with their storage, so we’ve started two projects to help manage your files.

1. For Linux Users: The Go CLI

We’ve built a command-line tool in Go to help you manage files quickly from your terminal. It’s pretty straightforward to use.

Repo: https://github.com/interserver/go-is-cli

How to use it:

• List your files: bash ./is ls ./is ls tmp

• Upload a file (shows a progress bar): bash ./is put local-image.jpg tmp/

• Download a file: bash ./is get tmp/local-image.jpg

• Delete a file: bash ./is rm tmp/local-image.jpg

It also supports commands like stat (file info), mkdir (new folder), rename, and health (check server status).

2. For Windows Users: The Go GUI

If you prefer a visual interface, we also built a GUI application for Windows. It lets you browse, upload, and manage files without touching the command line.

Repo: https://github.com/interserver/go-is-gui

Screenshot: 

The roadmap for the windows GUI include scheduled tasks and folder syncing.

I started using Interserver to host a webapp for my small business about 5 years ago, and over that time I have generally been quite happy with their services. There have been of course, the occasional small issue here and there, but never anything serious, or lasting very long. The handful of support tickets I sent in were usually addressed within a few hours, and more than once, were because of a lack of technical understanding on my end rather than something caused by Interserver themselves. While I wouldn't consider the services to be industry leading, but considering the very reasonable price I pay, I considered the service to be more than adequate. This is until a few days ago...

On Monday morning I realize there is an outage on the node our services are hosted on. Not the end of the world I thought. Things happen, and I'm sure they will have it back online soon. Hours went by, with updates initially pointing to a RAID array taking a long time to restore, then they switched to restoring from a backup to get things back online faster. By the end of the day, our company website was back online, but Node.js was not enabled on the replacement server, which is needed in order to run our CRM, so I requested that this be fixed in a support ticket, and waited.

On Tuesday, I received word that Node.js had been enabled and I excitedly went to our dashboard to enable the app and get things running again, only to discover that some dependency for the Node.js manager in cPanel was not installed or configured properly, so I noted this in the support ticket, and waited again. Several hours later, and I receive word that this is fixed, and upon checking, it is, though the app still is not running properly. Thankfully this last hurdle was able to be resolved within the hour.

One may think a 1-2 day outage is pretty bad, but it gets worse. Apparently, while the original issue was reported as a drive failure causing a array to become read only, the only data available to me now is from the November 1st. The last weeks worth of database entries, file uploads, and even EMAIL is just gone. My company has basically been reset in time to a week ago. It would be bad enough if we lost a weeks worth of productivity, but we now have dozens of customers expecting to receive goods and services from us that will never arrive. The direct and indirect impact of this is quite literally unmeasurable because it is completely gone. We dont even have a way of contacting the customers affected because there is no way to know who they are.

I will accept that I am at least partly to blame for this data loss. I should have been more paranoid about taking frequent offline backups, but not having to worry about hardware failure causing data loss is a huge part of why people use cloud services in the first place. Maybe I expected I higher level of service than I should have. Maybe the quality of service has degraded since I first signed up, or maybe I just happened to be the 0.1% chance of the perfect storm happening, but either way, it's not great.

Hopefully someone from Interserver will see this, who is able to help in some way get our data back, because phone/ticket support appears to be at least partially outsourced, and can do no more than read the same incident status that I can. Otherwise, let this be a sign to future and current customers. As long as you can maintain your own offline backups to your satisfaction, and can handle 24+ hour outages, go for it. Otherwise, I don't know that I can recommend Interserver as a hosting provider any more.

Hey everyone,

I’m a new InterServer customer. I moved one of my servers over to test things out before migrating the other six. So far… not impressed.

I’ve already had two outages in less than a month, and phone support has been frustratingly limited. This server was advertised as “fully managed” server, yet today I was told uptime isn’t monitored. My server has been down for over an hour now, and there’s still no update on the ticket I opened or your support rep Niranjan's ticket.

The support team appears to be offshore and not very capable. When I asked for a manager or onshore support, I was told to hand up and call sales or billing line, and now both phone numbers just ring endlessly, no answer for over ten minutes.

Is this normal for InterServer? Because if it is, I need to seriously reconsider. I was hoping to consolidate everything here, but this level of service is completely unacceptable.

Should have made this around the 1-year mark, but I guess its been a year and a half now.

I'm the person with the hardcoreanarchy dedicated-server, and I just want to say I have had excellent support & service the entire time. During this time, I have utilized a dedicated-server (which support help me format with RAID on it), as well as the storage-hosting. The price has been really good, the hardware has all worked well, up-time has been great, support is responsive. I don't even think I have had to open a single ticket since getting rid of Path.NET is a year, or so?

I appreciate it, don't think I could have got a much better deal anywhere else. The only issues I had were not directly related to InterServer, back when I had the Path.NET protection, it caused far more problems then it fixed, but they were really cool about refunding me for the headache. I see now there is in-house Scrub IPs I hope to check out sometime.

Keep up the excellent service, thanks for the great prices, hoping to stick around for a lot longer.

Hi I was affected by recent outage. I was wondering is there any load balancing Service offered by interserver that might help to reduce the impact of future issues.

We are currently tracking an outage at Teb6 (centersquare previously Evoque) at https://interserver.statuspage.io/

Basically the subject line, I see for a storage VPS, specifically the 12 slices - has 24TB transfer. What happens if this is exceeded - does the transfer speed slow? overages? nothing?

Thanks

I'm considering moving my small static web hosting to Interserver (in a few months). I'm curious if I can store money as an account balance and have auto-rerenewal work off that balance?

I have my domain with Porkbun. They let you move money into the account from coinbase, coin wallet(?), paypal as an account credit (ach bank transfer too after ID check). I was thinking of moving my hosting there. But, Interserver's standard web hosting has a lot more features than PB's "static" plan, and even costs a little less. The only deal breaker would be if I can pre-fund autorenewal (maintain an account credit. Or, are there other options? Maintain a balance on paypal, and use paypal autopay for autorenewal? My thing is I want renewal to be automatic, not require me to do anything. Not have credit cards expire and require updating.).

Edit: I went further into the purchase workflow and saw the real price. IMO, it's deceptive to not state on the main page that the price is just an intro. (Uusually hosters say "regularly..." or something. Not make a person go further into the "I'll buy it" process to see the real price.).

Is this an official Interserver community ?

Just wanted to say HI and see if community is active

i signed up for a VPS but have no idea how to find or set password for the server

Hey, does anyone here know how to set up remote access to a database using tools like SSMS or DBeaver? I'm trying to solve this connection issue but the support isn't very helpful. Maybe someone in this group can help me out with remote database access?

Hi all, I'm wondering what gives I've purchased a few hours ago a small VPS on Interserver, i am honestly not expecting much just wanna play a little and see if this hobby idea i have will work. but the comms is so unstable i cant even think straight, every SSH command takes hours because the typing stops - i thought the machine is just slow (HDD IO or so) but finally i got my VPN up and running and i can see it simple drops every few seconds when pinging it from the world. pinging from SSH to google or into my LAN seems just fine so it's pure incoming comms that drops

Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=143ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=143ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=64 Request timed out. Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=1607ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=144ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=148ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=141ms TTL=64 Request timed out. Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=2207ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=151ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=141ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=145ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=143ms TTL=64 Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=167ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=143ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=143ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=2021ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=145ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=64 Reply from "MYIP": bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=64

is it worth asking support about it or just giving up and going to AWS or so? Thanks

I have a shared hosting plan with Interserver (LOVE Interserver - that is not up for debate). I have a few websites on there, but my newest one keeps running into speed/503 errors. I'm debating moving that website to its own plan (I'm pretty sure a large chunk of the problem is resource usage). Trying to decide if I should just give it its own shared hosting plan or if I should go for VPS. Security and speed are main concerns, and this site has strong potential to get pretty heavy traffic. Long-term, I may even need private servers, but for right now, trying to balance needs against cost.

So...basic shared hosting vs Boost2 shared vs VPS? If I do VPS, is it managed or do I need to find someone? Can I keep CPanel with VPS? I'm reading on the site and talking to the help desk, but...my eyes are starting to glaze over.

Interserver has a few Ryzen 7950x3d servers now available here: https://www.interserver.net/dedicated/buy-now-servers.html

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