This guide explains how to modify your current Serveur Cloud offer.

Modification of resources and configuration

The base Cloud Server plan includes 5 hostings and 20 websites. To add an additional hosting or modify the server configuration to increase CPU / RAM:

1. Click here to access the management of your product on the Infomaniak Manager (need help?).
2. Click on the action menu ⋮ located to the right of the relevant item.
3. Click on Modify the offer:
   
4. Make the desired adjustments and complete the procedure.

To reduce the size of the entire Server Cloud disk space:

1. Order a new server with the desired new storage (contact support to order the new server for free while you complete the steps below).
2. Move the hosting from the old server to the new one.
3. Cancel the old server.

Refer to this other guide to modify the disk space of a hosting.

Increase the process limit

On Linux, the number of processes that a user or system can create simultaneously is limited. These limits help prevent processes that are too fast from consuming excessive resources and affecting the overall stability of the system. Process limits are managed by the Linux kernel and can be viewed and modified using specific commands and configuration files. You can request to increase the limits by contacting support.

This guide details the use of Crontab (crons via SSH), available only on Serveur Cloud, by default (there is also a task scheduler for all hosting).

Prerequisites

• The script files called by the cron must be executable (CHMOD).

Absolute path

Cron tasks are not aware of the absolute path. Calling PHP without specifying the full paths to the executable therefore makes it impossible to execute the task.

It is necessary to specify

/opt/phpX.X/bin/php

by replacing X.X with the desired PHP version (/opt/php7.1/bin/php for example).

Other operations
 

• List the crons for the SSH user in question:

  crontab -l -u NomUtilisateurSSH

• Edit the crons:

  crontab -e -u NomUtilisateurSSH

• To be notified by email of the result of your cron tasks (to be added at the beginning of the file):

  MAILTO=e-mail@domain.xyz

Restore a backup

Infomaniak backs up crons for the last 7 days (once a day). In case of accidental deletion, contact Infomaniak support to request a restoration by specifying the time and date of the deletion.

This guide helps you find the public IP address of your device, which can be useful for certain support requests, among other things.

Display the public IP address on the connected device

Click here to obtain the public IP address of your device in IPv4 and IPv6 format.

Alternative methods

Visit ipinfo.io or ifconfig.me.

... on macOS

1. From a terminal application (command line interface, CLI) on your device, run the command curl ifconfig.me and press enter.
2. The displayed address is the public IP address of the computer.

To automate the search for the public IP address, use commands or scripts that query services such as api.ipify.org ...

This guide explains how to use PHP environment variables with Web Hosting that runs on php-fpm.

Preamble

Using environment variables

To use PHP environment variables:

1. Define the PHP environment variables in a .htaccess file:

   • SetEnv EXAMPLEVARIABLE hello

2. In your PHP file, the name of the variable to call must be prefixed with REDIRECT_:

   • <?php getenv('REDIRECT_EXAMPLEVARIABLE');

In this example, the displayed result will be hello.

Going further with environment variables

It is possible to configure environment variables directly from the Manager for your entire website:

1. Click here to access the management of your product on the Infomaniak Manager (need help?).
2. Click directly on the name assigned to the concerned product:
3. Click on Manage under Advanced settings:
   
4. Click on the PHP / Apache tab.
5. Click on the chevron ‍ to expand the Environment Variables section.
6. Click on the icon ‍ Add.
7. Enter the variable and its value.
8. Click on the button to save:
   

This guide helps resolve issues related to special characters (accents, emojis, etc.) that do not display correctly or appear as symbols like ??, often due to incorrect encoding when connecting to MySQL.

Preamble

• By default, MySQL uses UTF-8.
• Recent MySQL servers are generally configured to use UTF-8 or UTF-8MB4 by default.
  • This is suitable for most cases, especially for international languages and emojis.
• Also refer to this other guide to learn how to avoid causing encoding issues with non-European characters and emojis in your developments.

Set the default MySQL / MariaDB charset (Cloud Server)

With a Infomaniak Cloud Server, it is possible to set the default charset (utf8 or utf8mb4):

1. Click here to access the management of your product on the Infomaniak Manager (need help?).
2. Click directly on the name assigned to the relevant product.
3. Click on MariaDB in the left sidebar and then choose the default charset:
   

If you have not yet migrated to MariaDB, the principle is the same:

Force a specific encoding (e.g., latin1)

If you need to work with a database in latin1 (ISO-8859-1), you must explicitly set the encoding when connecting, depending on your environment.

For current offers, place the following code in a user.ini file located at the root of your hosting:

mysql.connect_charset = "latin1"
mysqli.connect_charset = "latin1"
pdo_mysql.connect_charset = "latin1"

or in PHP (MySQL API):

mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET latin1");

On older hosting plans, force the MySQL connection to latin1 via the .htaccess file located at the root of your hosting:

php_value mysql.connect_charset latin1
php_value mysqli.connect_charset latin1
php_value pdo_mysql.connect_charset latin1

Supervisor is not offered directly because systemd is recommended, better integrated with Debian and available in Fast installer.

If you were to install it anyway, contact Infomaniak support in writing.

This guide explains how to back up a VPS Cloud in the form of a snapshot.

Introduction

• A snapshot is like a photo of your VPS Cloud at a given moment in time, containing everything on your server, including your operating system, applications, data, etc.
• Snapshots can be used notably for…
  • … protect your VPS Cloud in case of an issue: if you encounter a problem with your VPS Cloud, you can restore a snapshot to revert to a previous state.
  • … test changes without risk: before making significant changes to your VPS Cloud, you can create a snapshot to be able to go back if necessary.
• You benefit from a free snapshot to back up your entire server in a dedicated space. If needed, you can order additional space or delete a snapshot to create a new one.
• Two types of backup are possible:
  1. Data snapshot: allows you to create an image of the volume containing your data (not available for Windows distributions).
  2. **Operating system** snapshot: allows you to create an image of the volume containing your operating system. This type of backup involves a brief interruption of your applications and websites.
• It is recommended to create snapshots regularly, for example once a week or once a month; this will allow you to have a history of your VPS Cloud and to be able to go back in case of a problem.
• It is obviously possible to restore the state of the VPS Cloud thanks to the previously created snapshot.

Create a snapshot

For this:

1. Click here to access the management of your product on the Infomaniak Manager (need help?).
2. Click directly on the name assigned to the product in question.
3. Click on Snapshot in the left sidebar.
4. Click on the blue button Create a snapshot:
   
5. Choose the type of snapshot to create (data or operating system).
6. Click on the blue button to start creating the snapshot:
   
7. An email is sent when the snapshot is generated.

Delete a snapshot

For this:

1. Click here to access the management of your product on the Infomaniak Manager (need help?).
2. Click directly on the name assigned to the product in question.
3. Click on Snapshot in the left sidebar.
4. Click on the action menu ⋮ to the right of the relevant item in the displayed table.
5. Click on Delete:
   

Order additional snapshots

For this:

1. Click here to access the management of your product on the Infomaniak Manager (need help?).
2. Click directly on the name assigned to the product in question.
3. Click on Snapshot in the left sidebar.
4. Click on the shopping cart icon:
   
5. Follow the instructions to complete the order.

It is not possible to order an additional snapshot if a snapshot is in progress.

This guide explains how to increase the storage volume of your VPS Cloud once the offer change has been made.

Preamble

• By default, the VPS Cloud comes with two volumes:
  • 1 volume for the operating system of your choice (/dev/vda).
  • 1 volume for storing your data (/dev/vdb), this is the one that will be increased.
• Note: depending on the installed operating system, the system volume may be named /dev/sda, /dev/sda1 or /dev/vda; the same applies to the data volume /dev/sdb, /dev/sdb2 or /dev/vdb … It is therefore necessary to replace these indications with those corresponding to your situation.

SSH commands to increase storage volume

If you choose **XFS**, for example, it is necessary to install the appropriate tools (if they are not already present):

sudo apt install xfsprogs

Then increase the volume with the following SSH commands:

sudo xfs_grow /dev/vdb

And if you choose EXT4:

sudo resize2fs /dev/vdb

Expanding the volume after increasing the storage volume

Two scenarios may arise once you have extended the storage volume of your Linux server. Note that no data is deleted when increasing the space via the VPS plan change.

First scenario

In the case where the entire volume is used without partitioning, it is not necessary to perform a resizepart, since there is no partition.

sudo umount /dev/vdb
sudo fsck.ext4 -f /dev/vdb
sudo resize2fs /dev/vdb

Second scenario

In the case of a volume that contains a partition (/dev/vdb1), you must first stop the processes that use this volume and then unmount the partition.

sudo umount /dev/vdb1

Next, you need to increase the partition size with parted, which has the resizepart command, unlike fdisk.

sudo parted /dev/vdb
GNU Parted 3.2
Using /dev/vdb
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type ‘help’ to view a list of commands.
(parted) resizepart 1 100%
(parted) quit
sudo fsck.ext4 -f /dev/vdb1
sudo resize2fs /dev/vdb1

And the System volume?

It is not possible to increase the size of the system volume.

For Linux, Infomaniak provides 20 GB, sufficient for any Linux distribution.

For Windows, Infomaniak provides 100 GB on the C drive, which is sufficient for Windows. Applications must be installed on the D drive. If you have 50 GB, you can request 100 GB (contact Infomaniak support specifying a time slot for the operation as there will be a few minutes of interruption to expect).

This guide explains how to access the bootloader of a VPS Cloud / VPS Lite from the Infomaniak Manager.

Display the bootloader of a VPS Cloud / VPS Lite

The following procedure allows you to display the bootloader of GRUB:

1. Click here to access the management of your product on the Manager Infomaniak (need help?).
2. Click directly on the name assigned to the relevant product.
3. Click on Open VNC console.
4. Click on Restart the server while keeping the new window with the VNC console displayed.
5. Refresh the VNC console as soon as the server restarts to display the server's bootloader; GRUB will then appear and you can keep it displayed by pressing a key on your keyboard:
   

This guide explains how to display and interpret monitoring data (network, CPU, RAM statistics, etc.) for a Cloud Server.

Monitoring the activity of a Managed Cloud Server

To access monitoring

1. Click here to access the management of your product on the Infomaniak Manager (need help?).
2. Click directly on the name assigned to the relevant product.
3. Click on Monitoring in the left sidebar

Various data is available to monitor the activity of your Cloud Servers, including:

• incoming and outgoing traffic (network)
• the system load average
• the average CPU load
• the amount of random access memory (RAM) used
• disk space used
• the number of hits per second.
• the average number of MySQL queries performed

Interpret the statistics

By interpreting the monitoring of a Cloud Server's resources, you can estimate the resources (power) you need to run your websites and web applications.

Total system load

The total system load summarizes, in percentage, the level of utilization of the virtual processors. In this example, the server is therefore using less than 10% of its resources (0.10).

Processor (CPU) and memory (RAM)

These graphs show that less than 10% of the virtual processors are used and that less than 3 GB of RAM are actually utilized. In this example, the configuration of this server is therefore oversized compared to the actual needs.

High cached memory

High cached memory on a server is not abnormal and is often beneficial in many cases. Here's why:

1. Caching for enhanced performance: Modern operating systems, such as Linux, use free memory to cache data from the disk to improve performance. When you access files or applications, the system can quickly retrieve the data from the cache instead of reading it from slower storage devices, such as hard drives. This helps to reduce the overall response time of your server and can significantly improve performance.
2. Efficient memory usage: High memory usage due to caching means that your server is effectively utilizing the available memory. Unused memory is wasted memory. Therefore, as long as the memory is used for useful purposes like caching, it is a positive sign.
3. Automatic memory management: Operating systems are designed to automatically adjust the size of the cache based on the needs of running applications. If an application requires more memory, the cache can reduce its size to accommodate it. This dynamic memory management ensures a balance between caching and serving active applications.
4. Monitoring perspective: From a monitoring standpoint, seeing high memory usage due to caching can initially raise concerns, but it is essential to interpret the metrics in the context of your server's behavior. If you observe good performance and notice no signs of memory-related issues, such as swapping or application crashes, the high cache usage is likely expected and beneficial.

In summary, high cache memory on a server is normal and can contribute to improving the overall system performance. Do not worry if you observe significant cache memory usage, as long as your server is functioning correctly and there are no obvious memory-related issues. Caching is an essential tool for optimizing performance and making the most of available resources.