We are continually trying to improve our products and beginning this week a dedicated IP will be included with all VPS 100 accounts. If you are an existing VPS 100 customer you may request a dedicated IP at no additional cost by opening a support ticket. Keep in mind that your domain will have to be updated to point to the new IP address. This is really easy if you are already using our DNS servers.

Additional IPs for your VPS may still be purchased at $2 p/mo, as long as you provide a valid justification.

About the VPS 100

The VPS 100 is our entry level VPS offering 10GB Disk space, unlimited domains, 100GB data transfer, 256mb RAM burstable to 512MB. For $20 a month it is one of the best VPS offerings on the market fine tuned for running PHP frameworks & applications. It also includes DNS and Email service hosted in our servers outside your VPS so all the resources are used for your website hosting. For more information visit servergrove.com/vps

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) is gaining momentum. It requires merchants (and providers) to “use strong cryptography and security protocols such as SSL/TLS or IPSEC to safeguard sensitive cardholder data during transmission over open, public networks.” when dealing with credit card numbers and account information.

One aspect of securing the data is the encryption of the communication between the browser (client) and the server. Most of our customers use Apache web server, and by default, this lets clients use weak encryption protocols and ciphers, mainly for backward compatibility with old browsers.

We recommend our customers to include these Apache configuration directives in their ssl.conf file. In fact, all our VPS images include this by default:

# use strong SSL protocols, specially do not enable SSLv2
SSLProtocol -ALL +SSLv3 +TLSv1

# Do not accept weak SSL ciphers from clients.
SSLCipherSuite ALL:!aNULL:!ADH:!eNULL:!LOW:!EXP:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM

If you own a SSL certificate, you can test it along with the server configuration using this excellent service from SSL Labs.

To know more about our VPS offering for ecommerce follow this link.