GoDaddy Guide

Video here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1etmer9gyGOkD3SzQHuCGqB1AMKNjB5ug/view?usp=sharing

Quick View Guide for Managing GoDaddy Server and Hosting for CDS

Key Takeaways for Managers:

1. Primary Domains to Monitor:

   citydata.services.net: Main application server with important records.

   citydataservices.com: Used for Google Workspace and email services.

2. Critical Actions:
   • Disk Space Management:

     Monitor disk usage regularly.

     Delete older backups when disk space is nearing capacity.

     Consider upgrading server storage if space issues persist (e.g., from 100GB to 200GB).

   • Server Maintenance:

     Restarting servers can resolve issues but should be done with caution due to specific configurations that may not start automatically post-reboot.

   • Backup Restoration:

     Utilize automatic backups to restore the server and settings in case of failure.

   • Server Upgrade:

     Schedule upgrades during low-usage times (e.g., holidays) to minimize downtime.

3. Navigation Steps:
   • Accessing GoDaddy Products:

     Go to "My Products" in GoDaddy to find all services related to your account.

     Use "Manage" under the relevant server for detailed control and monitoring.

   • Monitoring and Alerts:

     Check CPU, RAM, and disk space usage in the server management dashboard.

     Set up email alerts in the GoDaddy admin account for high server usage or other critical notifications.

   • Clearing Disk Space:

     Locate and delete backups manually to free up space.

     This task can be demonstrated by team members experienced with the process.

4. Website Security:
   • Firewall and Access Control:

     Use GoDaddy’s firewall settings to monitor and control traffic.

     Block or allow IP addresses if there are access issues or to mitigate malicious activity.

     Navigate to "Website Security" > "Deluxe" > "Firewall Settings" > "Access Control" for IP management.

   • Geo-Blocking:

     Implement geo-blocking as needed for enhanced security.

5. Server IP and Configuration:

   Note the IP address for remote desktop connections.

   Understand that the server runs on Windows Server 2022, handling both the application and database.

6. Backup and Recovery:

   Automatic backups are in place for the application, database, and server settings.

   Restore using GoDaddy’s backup system when necessary.

7. Website Management:

   PHP files control the content served (e.g., images). Edit these if you need to update visuals or static content.

8. Future Improvements:

   Upgrading the server will support operational stability for the next few years.

   Routine checks and proactive management can help prevent outages due to high disk usage.

Essential Reminders:

Restarting the Server: Only in critical scenarios, as improper restarts can lead to startup issues.

Disk Space Issues: Commonly lead to server downtime; hence, prompt action is necessary.

Monitoring Traffic: Use access control to block potential threats and allow necessary IPs.

CDS Go Daddy - 2024/11/14 18:34 GMT+04:00 - Transcript

Attendees

Abhi Karale, Abhi Karale's Presentation, Mike Walker

Transcript

Abhi Karale: for our You recording? Great. So there's a handful of domains that we have on GoDaddy that host the server and…

Mike Walker:

Abhi Karale: the app. So, there's two that are The most …

Mike Walker: Can you share screen?

Mike Walker: Are you going to share screen?

Abhi Karale: You can cut this part out of the video. Okay, let me start over. So, for CDF, we manage all of our domains on GoDaddy. and as you can see, there's small handful of them here. and I'll walk through the ones that are the two most important ones.

Mike Walker: Yeah. Listen.

Abhi Karale: This is the most important one. data services.net. Give me a second here. I don't know why city data services that let's see what's going on here. So you can see that there's a bunch of different records here, Some of these connect to the website. The most important one is This is the actual server where the application is hosted, the actual machine, right? And so you establish a link through the city data serviceservices.net. And then there's a variety of other things here, email some Google servers, etc. this isn't that important, but this is, when you log into citydatservices.net, it's served out of this domain.

Abhi Karale: You also have citydaservices.com which is obviously where we have our Google workspace and all those emails and things like that. They go through here, So these are obviously the two most important domains, And you don't have to worry exactly about what these records mean and what they're used for. It's not super important, but this is for email. This is for when you connect when you want custom domains on Zoho and Zenesk you have to actually configure that here. I wanted to verify Zenesk. So I had to change the DNS. So this is kind of all of the settings of the var of the server, right? And NS is a name server. So we're using GoDaddy as the name server. So this is kind of where all the settings are configured on GoDaddy.

Abhi Karale: What you could do in theory is if you wanted to use another provider like Cloudflare, which is another, in my opinion way better than GoDaddy, you can actually move these name server domains to Cloudflare and Cloudflare would actually then manage all of these different parameters and everything. …

Mike Walker: What is that customer? Right.

Abhi Karale: this is an interesting one. This is the custom app I set up for CVS. I connected it to app.cityervices.com. and so this is the subdomain. at some point I was trying something. So this is another little new modernized application that I was working on. I deployed it and stuff. It's not really that relevant at the moment. So these are our domains. The most critical thing is under servers. This is the most critical thing period.

Abhi Karale: let's go to manage. When people say the server is down or whatever this is what they mean. So this is the IP address of the server. So when you com connect to remote desktop here and you connect to this and you want to connect to the CDS server this is actually where it goes. So this is actually what's running the code of CDS and you can see it runs on a Windows 2022 server. There's some history here and then a lot of the usage here. So you can see the CPU cores, the RAM and the disk space which as you can see has been filling up rapidly. And so typically what Tyler does is he has to delete backups many times from the server.

Abhi Karale: And when the server goes down many many times it's because of something like this where the disk space gets used up the memory there goes utilization goes like crazy things like that and so that really creates a problem and…

Mike Walker:

Abhi Karale: this is the IP address of the server so there's a few things you can do here.

Mike Walker: Can you just explain a bit more about the disc space?

Mike Walker: Why do we not have more or why does it fill up so fast?

Abhi Karale: We do a lot of data and code backups on a daily basis and that fills up space on the C drive and…

Mike Walker: So is it normal procedure that keeps on overflowing? It's

Abhi Karale: it's not normal procedure. Its there's just so much stuff going on there. We should increase the size of the CDS server. And I told Carolos that we're going to actually do this. The only issue is it creates downtime. So the server will actually not work while it upgrades and adds more space.

00:05:00

Mike Walker: All right.

Abhi Karale: Because I want to upgrade the server and I want to take it to this one which has 200 GB of storage instead of 100 and it has way more memory and stuff like that too. and then monitoring. So this is really where you see that usage, So you can see this is a problem like the disk usage is very high. CPU under control, the RAM is only 44%. It's okay. Disc usage super high. This is a problem.

Mike Walker: Yeah, go on week and…

Abhi Karale: Yeah,…

Mike Walker: look at yesterday. See if you can see the outage there.

Abhi Karale: look at that.% disc 99% RAM.

Mike Walker: And yeah,…

Abhi Karale: You see this?

Mike Walker: then it went offline, right?

Abhi Karale: And now you know why? because we're literally operating so freaking close like Yeah.

Mike Walker: How long does it take to upgrade this? Can we not just do it on a weekend? none of our customers are probably.

Abhi Karale: Yeah. I'm just very worried if something goes wrong so we have to make sure we're back we have backups and prepared. We will upgrade it either this week or next week though.

Mike Walker: Okay. Okay. Cool.

Abhi Karale: Yeah. Thanksgiving would be a good time because it's also very low volume because people will be off and yeah but anyway you get some history here you get some stuff here you can see why the outages happen etc. So there's also all these automatic backups that you see that are happening and you can always restore the server to a backup. So everything failed for example you can just say hey let's take this backup and you'll have the full backup of the application the server settings the database everything so the way CDS works is that everything runs on a remote machine hosted by CDS.

Abhi Karale: So in AWS you have decoupled services right you have EC2 to manage your machines and RDS to manage your databases whatever here it's literally a computer that has a database running on it and…

Mike Walker:

Abhi Karale: it also has the server running on it through this IP address and…

Mike Walker: Mhm.

Abhi Karale: you can see where it's stored and stuff like that and so there's automatic backup plan honestly this is it man so you have some reports and some alerts. And if you go in the admin at cityatervices.com account, you can set up notifications to go to yourself, right? …

Mike Walker: Yeah, We get them already. But I guess my question is I received that not notification server usage is super high and then eventually server was down. So what action should I take at that point?

Abhi Karale: you need to delete backups…

Mike Walker:

Abhi Karale: because almost all the problem is never the RAM and the problem is never the CPU cores and it is all always this period because when things hit…

Mike Walker: Can you show me that process?

Abhi Karale: what was ask Tyler and…

Mike Walker: Can you show me the process of deleting backups?

Abhi Karale: record that call. He'll show you.

Mike Walker: Okay, cool. Okay.

Abhi Karale: Yeah, that's an action step for you. you can also restart the server. sometimes that works, but it won't solve the root problem, which is the disk space problem. And I would also be very very careful with restarting servers. sometimes these servers can be configured in very particular ways. and things might not start up automatically and that whatever whenever you restart a server it can happen sometimes in CDSS case I don't think there's an issue restarting the server but that's truly worst case situation we shouldn't restart the server ideally unless things are really stuck or there's some big problem or something like that so when we upgrade the server you really won't have any downtime

Abhi Karale: and you're going to be okay for a long time.

Mike Walker:

Abhi Karale: Probably the next 3 4 years once we double the size of the server for 40 extra bucks a month. but until then you should learn how to delete the backups as well because now you can literally see the impact of what happens right the second this went up to 99%. The CPU spiked up because it just didn't know what to do. there were. So yeah, you can see that here, right? Yeah.

Mike Walker: Yeah, I didn't enjoy putting me having an inbox and…

Mike Walker: seeing that and then realizing no one was online. But then I also realized I could get back. It fixed itself for some reason on this one.

Mike Walker:

00:10:00

Abhi Karale: I don't know what happened here because there's this period where there's just blank, Maybe the server reset itself or I actually don't know what happened because there's no monitoring here for that period of time. But you can see there's many things that are not good that happen here that we need to, avoid and you can see all this data here. so once again, where is that? That's all under hosting. So if you go to your product page, what are the products that we use in GoDaddy? we have the servers, right? And so City Data Service,…

Mike Walker: Yeah, that one on the left is quite weird. Okay.

Abhi Karale: City Data. I believe is a marketing website. I don't think you've ever seen it, have you? Yeah. So, this is the main application. And so, this homepage, right, sits on the server. There's a PHP file of the server. if you want to remove this weird picture or any of these pictures, you can remove those from the server. because there's a PHP file that serves an image. But the city data services website I believe is let's go to my products. So Godaddy is always a bit confusing but always come back to my products. That's the best place kind of to Go down web hosting manage. This is where that marketing I believe they built the website through. Yeah.

Abhi Karale: So they're using GoDaddy I believe to actually manage this particular website the city data.services one.

Mike Walker:

Abhi Karale: This is pure code thenet one and citydataservices.com. it doesn't even have a website. honestly we should redirect this to citydatervices.net that. But yeah, there's not even a website for city dataservices.com.

Mike Walker: Yeah. No,…

Abhi Karale: And then city data.services and I think there's some links into city services from here, but I don't know it's a bit weird. yeah. Any questions so far? Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Walker: not really. I think it will make sense. what's that bottom one to you? is that still in

Abhi Karale: This was So, this one doesn't even have a legitimate domain.

Mike Walker:

Abhi Karale: I don't know why we even own this domain. I think maybe when we bought it, they gave it to us. And Tuyu was also one of Steve's old domains that we just like never used. Yeah.

Mike Walker: Do we pay any fees on these or…

Mike Walker: no? Okay.

Abhi Karale: No idea. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, we pay for the domain.

Mike Walker: So we could get rid of this. Yeah.

Abhi Karale: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. move, where can I cut the margin a little bit or improve the margin a little bit? so that's kind of an overview of GoDaddy. summarizing once again very very quickly the most important thing is the server this is where really the heart of the application whenever people say the application is down or whatever this is where all of the action happens you can always click in and manage it and go through all of that as well there's one other key part as well that I didn't mention which is website security is very very important so we have firewall protection

Abhi Karale:

Abhi Karale: that sometimes blocks. Yeah, there we go. So, we have firewall protection on cd dataservices.net monitoring I showed you, but we also have this thing. where is it? Yeah, there we go. So, GoDaddy offers this. You can see reports, all of that. We don't really use this that often. but it is there real time and I think settings there's a place you can actually block IP addresses.

Mike Walker: Yeah.

Abhi Karale: So many times where is it overview? So if you're in Dubai for example or some other country you'll sometimes have issues access control. There we go. allow IP addresses. So if you ever find yourself blocked or whatever, you might need to add your own IP address here and allow it. So you can actually do this and if you ever are really in a tough spot and you're like, " my god, there's some malicious attack or something's happening, you can also block IP addresses and you can actually also geob block." So I think I had to turn off Egypt for Mmood.

00:15:00

Abhi Karale: I don't know why India is off…

Mike Walker: Yeah.

Abhi Karale: but there's a Poland, Philippines, whatever, UAE, UK. So there's a few that were obviously we enable, But this is also very very important. So if you're running into any issues, you're like, " my god, there's an attack happening." You can and the IP, you can block them here. You can allow IPs, things like that. And then these other things, don't worry about too much. Yeah, but this is in a very weird spot. It's in a very counterintuitive spot. I'll show you again. You have to go to my products. you have to go to website security and…

Mike Walker:

Abhi Karale: then you have to go through to I guess website security deluxe and then from there it'll take you here and then you have to go into firewall settings access control. So it's pretty annoying…

Mike Walker: Right. Okay.

Abhi Karale: but you have the video so it'll help. yeah I guess the monitoring feature doesn't even work. yeah, any other questions? Yeah, so you can also see that we have it for some other websites going on too. This is obviously the most important one here. We don't even pay for backups. it's just yeah, but we also have the firewall for the main website as well.

Mike Walker: right, cool. no.

Mike Walker: I mean, is there anything else I'm likely to need to edit in here other than clearing the dis disc space making a lot of money off selling our domains. Yeah.

Abhi Karale: No, you can also stop the video, I think, just so we have the full transcript in nice format.

Meeting ended after 00:16:58 👋

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