Bluehost

February 2008 I stumbled across a webserver provider that provide quite a lot of space for a very small amount of money. You get (among other things) the following things for under 7$ a month:

1.5 terabyte of space (1500 gigabyte)
15 terabyte of data transfer per month
SSH/FTP/SFTP-access
For webhosting almost anything you can imagine:
PHP, CGI, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ruby, Perl, Shopping cart, Frontpage extensions and so on
Unlimited domains hosted
2500 mail accounts (POP/IMAP) with two different web mail solutions
Email auto-forwarder and auto-responder
Spam-protection for email
Full access to f.ex. .htacces and so on
Log-files/web statistics
Tons of hosted web applications like Forums, guestbooks, web-blogs, mailinglists, poll and survey, wiki, wiki, Mambo/Joomla and so on
Supports streaming video, audio, flash, shockwave
All hosted on fast internet lines and servers with UPS, Diesel generator

All in all a good deal. But we are just getting to the good part. Did you notice you get 1.5 terabyte of storage, and SSH-access? This means you can use it as a mapped drive on your linux/BSD-machine. All you need to do, is install SSHFS, and you can mount your storage at Bluehost on your machine, and access it as if it was another disk-drive. Of course it will be slower, depending on your internet connection, but ideal for backup in my opinion.

If you're a bit paranoid like me, you don't want to risk them (bluehost site admins) getting access to your files, and then you can use encfs on top of sshfs. Encfs is a great tool that makes all the files encrypted, you just use it as a normal folder. First a link to how to install sshfs/encfs on linux:
Secure Encrypted Remote Volume Howto
Now, a bit of info on how to do it on FreeBSD (assuming you have signed up for an account on Bluehost:

cd /usr/ports/sysutils/fusefs-sshfs/
make install
cd /usr/ports/sysutils/fusefs-encfs/
make install
Make sure you're in the operator group (type groups), if you're not, add yourself to /etc/groups on the operator line.
(as root): chown root:operator /dev/fuse*
(as root): chmod 0660 /dev/fuse*
(as root): sysctl vfs.usermount=1
mkdir ~/bluehost
mkdir ~/bluehost/ssh
mkdir ~/bluehost/enc
(on bluehost): mkdir enc

Now, you're ready to mount your Bluehost-drive, this can be put into a script if you want:

sshfs -o idmap=user,workaround=rename yourusername_at_bluehost@your_bluehost_ip_or_domain:enc ~/bluehost/ssh
encfs ~/bluehost/ssh ~/bluehost/enc

Notice that the first time you need to provide what kind of encryption you want. You might get some trouble if choosing paranoid, therefore I chose standard ( just press enter at the prompt). This will first mount up your space at Bluehost into ~/bluehost/ssh, then encrypt it with encfs, accessed through ~/bluehost/enc. You can now use ~/enc/ as a normal folder, but it is really encrypted at Bluehost in the enc-folder you made there. Try making a file in ~/bluehost/enc, putting some text in it, and then log onto your bluehost account and see how it looks. All garbled. Be sure to keep your password safe, since it will not be possible to access the files without the password. Also, encfs keeps a file in the root of your encrypted filesystem (~/enc/.encfs5 on bluehost). This file is also key to accessing the files...

To unmount it, just type

umount ~/bluehost/enc
umount ~/bluehost/ssh

.
Now, if that wasn't enough, we can go on :) You might want to backup your files, I use rdiff-backup to do it. I will explain how to get started on that as well.

cd /usr/ports/sysutils/rdiff-backup/
make install

Now, I will take an example if you want to backup your /etc and /usr/local/etc folders. This means you might want to mount up your folder on bluehost as root instead though. Use the same procedure, just do it as root. Exchange ~ with ~your_username. First, make two folders on your Bluehost-drive to keep the two backups in:

mkdir ~yourusername/bluehost/enc/etc
mkdir ~yourusername/bluehost/enc/usr-local-etc

Now, we go on to start rdiff-backup:

(as root): rdiff-backup /etc ~yourusername/bluehost/enc/etc
(as root): rdiff-backup /usr/local/etc ~yourusername/bluehost/enc/usr-local-etc

You will get some error about hardlinking, since that doesn't work over sshfs, but rdiff-backup will take care of this for you, so when you restore it the links will be correct. NB: You might want to run the commands in a screen, since depending on your bandwith and cpu (for compression/encryption), this might take some time.
I use rdiff-backup because it is quick, only replicate changes, and it keeps old files around if you need to restore an old copy. And with 1.5 terabyte for under 7$ a month, why not keep them around :). Here is a bit more info on using rdiff-backup to backup files to a sshfs-filesystem.

<Shameless plug> If you want to sign up for an account on Bluehost, please use my link, since it will give me a 65$ finder's fee :)

I hope this was useful to you, and if you're completely stuck or have questions, please send me a note on bluehost_question@mortencb.cx.


	Last updated: 21:10 29.02.2008 by webmaster@mortencb.cx You are from a country unknown to the IP-database. Comments to this page.

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