Turning off hostnamelookup in a shared hosting - .htaccess

I have a linux shared hosting account with cpanel for a drupal website. While optimizing the site (with the help of information from tools.pingdom.com), I found considerable waiting time of about 400-500 ms. Somehow, I found out about 'hostnamelookup'. But I am not able to figure out how to turn it off in a shared hosting account (as we cannot change the .conf file of server). Can this be done in .htaccess ?. Thank you.

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For IIS, what is the best way to update static files while maintaining availability on a live website?

I've investigated this and found lots of related information, but nothing that answers my question.
A little background. A small set of files are shared by IIS 10 statically. These files need to be updated usually weekly, but not more than once an hour (unless someone manually runs an update utility for testing). The files are expected to be a couple K bytes in size, no larger then 10 kilobytes. The update process can be run on the IIS server and will be written in PowerShell or C#.
My plan for updating files that are actively being served as static files by IIS is:
Copy the files to a temporary local location (on the same volume)
Attempt to move the files to the IIS static site location
The move may fail if the file is in use (by IIS). Implement a simple retry strategy for this.
It doesn't cause a problem if there is a delay in publishing these files. What I really want to avoid is IIS trying to access one of the files at just the wrong time, a race condition while my file replacement is in process. I have no control over the HTTP client which might be a program that's not tolerant of the type of error IIS could be expected to return, like an HTTP status 404, "Not Found".
I have a couple random ideas:
HTTP GET the file from IIS before I replace it with the intention of getting the file into IIS's cache in hopes that will improve the situation.
Just ignore this potential issue an hope for the best
I can't be the only developer who's faced this. What's a good way to address this issue? (Or is it somehow not an issue at all and I'm just over thinking it?)
Thanks in advance for any help.

WordPress wp-admin in Linux Shared Host is out of reach

These days I am facing a weird problem with my wordpress websites on a linux shared host.
I had 6 WordPress websites on my Linux shared host service. As two of them were moved to a new server, I tried to cleanup some mess by deleting some of the cached, temp and log files from different folders such as .trash, .cache, tmp and so on. (I don't remember what files are deleted from which folders exactly).
After this cleaning, I can see the main page of the websites but all /wp-admin's are out of reach even if I install a fresh WP.
When I try to access wp-admin I'll get the following error,
and after that I can't see the main pages for a few hours! It seems that cPanel is blocking my IP for a while, because my domain.com/cpanel is also not working after I tried domain/wp-admin.
Unfortunately, the Mesrahosting host provider has a terrible service support and they are not replying my tickets nor Whatsapp messages.
Any idea to solve this problem would be appreciated.
First of all the tmp folder should exist in your cPanel account. If you deleted it you have to create it in /home/cpaneluserame/tmp and it needs to have cpaneluser:cpaneluser ownership and also 755 permissions. That would be a 1st step. Since you are unable to access cPanel then most probably your ip got blocked by the server's firewall or cPhulkd. In most cases the block is just temporary. If you keep trying then depending on the server's firewall configuration and the settings of cPhulkd (that comes with WHM) your blocking time might be increased gradually. Try accessing cPanel from another ip address (use a proxy or VPN service) and see if that works. When you are able to access cPanel be sure to create /tmp folder and then try again and see if that works. If your ip address is permanently blocked then your only chance to unblock it is to request that to your hoster's tech support team.
So if I were you, I would try accessing cPanel from another ip address.

IIS: Auto-blacklisting flooding IPs?

Right now, we a have a site that is flooded and the site is very slow. Normally it is working well but someone decided to flood it today. We have other sites on the server and they are not directly affected. We have limited the amount of CPU that the flooded site may use.
We really need a solution to avoid flooding of sites like this case.
I have read this page:
http://www.acunetix.com/blog/articles/8-tips-secure-iis-installation/
It tells about temporarily dening IP addresses but it does not say for how long the IPs are denied access.
In addition, I rather like that the IPs were auto-blocked in IIS or even better in the Windows firewall. Is this possible?
Can someone help so the site can start behaving normally again? :-)
We are using IIS version 8.5 :-)

Directory / File Monitoring on Windows Server

Would anyone happen to know of an application / project that is able to monitor a series of directories on a web server.
We currently develop sites using Coldfusion 10, and would like a method or script or even application that actively monitors websites for any modifications to any files and automatically notifies administrators of any time someone or something has made an alteration to a file.
If Coldfusion is possible for this, that would be even better and any advice on how to to monitor directories would also be greatly appreciated
There's an example of a directory watcher gateway in the docs: "Using the example event gateways and gateway applications".
Google about for issues people have had with it though. before diving in.

IIS Virtual Directory in Azure

I've been told that you can create virtual directories in IIS hosted on Azure but I'm struggling to find any info on this as its a relatively new feature. I'd like to point the virtual directory to an Azure Drive (XDrive, NTFS Drive) so that I can reference resources on the drive.
I'm migrating an on premise website onto Azure and need to minimise the amount of rework / redevelopment required. Currently the website has access to shared content folders and I'm trying to mimic a similar set up due to tight time scales.
Does anyone have any knowledge of this or pointers for me as I can't find any information on how to do this?
Any information / pointers you have would be great
Thanks
Steve
I haven't had a moment to check myself, but get the latest copy of the Windows Azure Platform Training kit. I'm fairly certain that it has a hands on lab that demonstrates the new feature. However, I do not believe that lab includes creating a virtual directory on a azure drive. Even if you can point it there, you may run into some .NET security limitations. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=413e88f8-5966-4a83-b309-53b7b77edf78&displaylang=en
Another resource to look into might be the stuff Cory Fowler is doing http://blog.syntaxc4.net/ He's been spending some time of late really digging into the internals of the new 1.3 roles. So he might be able to lend you a hand.
I've been kicking this issue around for sometime now and I can upload a VHD to Azure and I can create a virtual directory in Azure that points to a physical location on my pc (when running in Dev fabic) and here is the but....
I can't find any examples on where I can do both at the same time, i.e. mount a drive and then map a virtual directory to it.
I've had a look in the 1.3 SDK and looked at various blogs but I can't see any pointers on this - I guess I may have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. If anyone knows how or if this can be done, that would be great.

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