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We are starting a website possibly with couple of thousands hits every day and few thousands registered users. By our hosting provider we were adviced to go with cloud hosting which we can easily expand later if we need. It is Ubuntu 11 running in WM.

The problem we run into is the disk is divided only in root and swap partition which is not advised from security point of view. When consulting this with technical support we got the reply that it is not possible to make more partitions and that it is mainly issue with windows server and linux is generally fine.

I'm looking here for an advice if we should switch the hosting for perhaps dedicated server where we have the full control or it is something not too be worried about too much.

mamadum
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    find another provider – Jim B Jun 01 '12 at 12:07
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    If your security is built upon the principle that you have multiple partitions (e.g. different mount options such as `noexec`), then you will probably have to change the provider unless you would want to work around that. Nobody knows that better than you. – Oliver Jun 01 '12 at 12:24

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Like Jim B said, get another provider.

There are many good reasons for splitting Linux filesystems onto their own partitions. The biggest one is not filling up / (and rendering the whole system unusable) if you have a runaway log in /var/log or some other disk-filling horror.

Security is usually a secondary concern (splitting things into their own partitions doesn't enhance security by itself, though it offers some DoS protection against disk-filling attacks. Setting noexec or nosuid on certain partitions can be a major security boon as Oliver mentioned). The sort of things setting noexec or nosuid protects against happen less often in the universe of *NIX systems, but it's still a good idea if it works for your environment.

voretaq7
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