Vistapages connected at GigE to MCI/Verizon Backbone

Posted on June 11, 2008
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Over the last few weeks, we have been making upgrades to our networking infrastructure in preperation for going from a copper connection to a fibre connection.

I doubt most of you have noticed, but we made the switch over from copper to fibre yesterday afternoon. The total switch over time was about 30 seconds. I’m happy to say the switch went without issue. 

Our network is  now connected directly by fibre optics to the #1 IP network in the world, powered by MCI/Verizon.

What does this mean?

  1. More pipe to handle spikes in traffic - Think of it as adding more lanes to a congested highway. Whenever there are traffic spikes, we will be able to keep things moving as there is more room for traffic to flow up and down. This is especially the case for digg’s, stumbleupons, slashdots and even DDOS attacks.
  2. Provides further scalability! - One phone call, and we have more bandwidth, without any physical changes to our network. Less downtime & maintenance is required.
  3. It’s Faster! - It’s faster. Plain and simple. 100Mbps vs 1000Mbps, you do the math :)

More goodies to come as we grow!

Enterprise Spam Protection, Doing Well!

Posted on April 24, 2008
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At the beginnig of February 2008, we adopted a new technology made available to us that would automatically block up to 95% of all incoming spam and viruses to our network and I’m very happy to say that it’s doing is job VERY well!

Here are some quick statistics:

February 2008

Total E-mails into our network: 9,685,998
Total Blocked: 9,345,664
Legitimate E-mails: 340,334

March 2008

Total E-mails into our network: 14,192,120
Total Blocked: 13,673,971
Legitimate E-mails: 518,149

April 2008 (to date: 4/24/2008 2:13PM EST)

Total E-mails into our network: 10,400,252
Total Blocked: 9,967,545
Legitimate E-mails: 432,707

Those are the final numbers from our e-mail filtering appliance. Keep in mind these are not numbers from Spam Assassin or BoxTrapper, these e-mails are being filtered even before they reach your inbox. Not many web hosting companies offer this value-added service free of charge, but Vistapages includes this free of charge to all of its shared hosting customers.

E-mail is one of the most used functions of our network, and allowing customers access to legitimate e-mails instead of sifting through spam and managing white lists, we’re increasing productivity and hopefully saving you money! After all, time is money!
 

October Horror. November Grrrreeeeeeeeat!

Posted on December 9, 2007
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I am sure many of you remember the troubles we had in October. I’m happy to report that our of the 20 or so servers that we manage, only 2-3 of them had issues with downtime due to high loads since the move. After placing our “Process Taser” to work on those servers & upgrading hardware on another, they have been free of issues since (knock on wood).We’ve also mitigated several DDOS attacks throughout the end of October & November and as recent as the beginning of this month (very small, wasn’t even worth mentioning). 

As promised, we’re making improvements on all fronts, all the time. Lots more improvements to come over the course of 2008 that will put Vistapages above and beyond many of our competitors!

Urghh… Spam! Oh, and our forums are back!

Posted on November 20, 2007
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I know many of you can relate to the title of this post when you hear the word “spam” and no I’m not talking about the food product. Spam costs businesses $10 billion dollars a year in wasted time & IT resources. This is no different in the case of Web hosting companies. We deal with millions and millions of incoming spam messages daily and not all of it can be filtered out by tools such as SpamAssassin or Boxtrapper, infact boxtrapper contributes to the cause (More information: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Mail/challenge-response.html).

Vistapages has been monitoring and testing a new tool that has become available to us that will enable us to remove virtually ALL spam without having the customer updating white lists, clearing junk-mail, etc… simply legitimate e-mail in your box, all the time, everytime! So far in our trails, we have seen e-mail accounts that have received 200-300 spam messages per day goto 0 spam messages per day, without having any legitimate e-mails filtered out as spam! I am very excited about this and I will be announcing it to be offered to customers for a very small  monthly fee — it does cost us money to maintain the service.

While we’re on the topic of “spam”, our online support community is back in full force. They were closed a few months back due to the number of sheer spambots flooding our forums with vulger content. We implemented a new tool that eliminated all of spambots from signing up and posting nonsense. Good clean fun now at the forums, so check them out! The URL is http://www.vistapagesforum.com/.

Kaumil Patel
President, Vistapages INC.

Vistapages is now Hacker Safe!

Posted on November 2, 2007
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I just wanted to make a little post about Hacker Safe and how it will benefit Vistapages! Vistapages’ network is now being monitored by ScanAlert’s Hacker Safe system to provide us with notifications/alerts whenever there is a vulnerability in our systems to prevent hackers from taking advantage of our network or servers. Just a little bit about Hacker Safe:

“ScanAlert, best known for its HACKER SAFE trustmark, is the world’s leading provider of website security services. HACKER SAFE technology protects over 250,000 websites, of which over 80,000 display the well known trustmark. In addition to being used by the majority of the Internet Retailer Top 500 list, it is the only trustmark displayed within the search results of major comparison shopping sites. As a leading provider of PCI compliance services, ScanAlert also delivers multilingual PCI validation to merchants and payment processors in over 70 countries. Tens of thousands of organizations - from small online businesses to FORTUNE 500 multinationals - rely on ScanAlert to protect, audit and certify the security of their networks and ecommerce infrastructure.”

If you want to learn more, take a look at: http://www.scanalert.com/site/en/security/enterprise-intro/

Just one more way that we’re making things better at Vistapages! There’s more to come!

Kaumil Patel
President, Vistapages INC.

“Process Taser” … Awesome little thing!

Posted on October 28, 2007
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Over the years, one of the most daunting tasks was to keep the server load to a reasonable level to keep services like apache, mysql, crons running. It’s very difficult to know exactly what people are doing with scripts on their hosting account and when they’ll do it. When an insecure script does get executed it usually shoots the load up to a point where services become locked up — causing slow downs, downtime, etc.

I spoke to our elite bash coder Ed, who then whipped up a little tool which we like to call the “Process Taser”.

Let me explain to you how it works and let’s use the above image to make it easier to explain!

When loads go up, it’s usually because of a customer executing an insecure script, or a script that is not behaving as it should (The student in the blue shirt) causing processes such as Apache to consume the resources of the server; causing the slow down/interruption (the class that was being lectured). The process taser (the fine people with the taser) locates the service that is being hammered, stuns it and restarts the service, causing the load to stay at reasonable load average (often after people are tased, they are in check and behaving as they should).

We have deployed the “Process Taser” on a few of our servers which experience higher loads about two weeks ago as a part of our effort to maintain a stable uptime guarantee for our customers. So far it has worked out to be flawless “knock on wood”. We’re continuing to refine the tool to be better than it already is!

This is not obviously the solution, but this is a tool to enable us to keep the server up while we find, locate and deal with the offending script. Hopefully I did a good job at explaining what I thought was an interesting little tool to increase the performance of our services.

Kaumil Patel
President, Vistapages, Inc.

October Horror

Posted on October 19, 2007
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The past two weeks have been horrendous. After receiving several complaints about our support team, I set out to hire new level 1, 2 and 3 technicians and had let go of those who were not sharing them same vision of our mission statement. This occured on October 3rd, 2007. 

A few hours after a few of the employee’s were let go, a group of them gained access through means that were unknown to us (which have now been identified and blocked) and inserted malacious code that would corrupt all data within the server if the server were to be rebooted. This code was found and removed from all active servers. Following the removal of the code, we started to experience a large DOS (Read more: denial-of-service) attack. This caused severe disruptions in service for a few days as it was off and on, it came in as spurts. At this point, we had been in talks with our upstream provider and were able to block their initial attempts at flooding our network. They further advanced their attempts and we could no longer fight off the attack with the current network toolset that we had in place — we were forced to make an emergency move of our affected network to a network that would be able to properly mitigate and handle attacks such as the one we were experiencing.

So the move began, Kevin, Ed, and Myself (I had to be there), started the move of the network to our new infrastructure setup, located within MCI/Verizon’s Enterprise datacenter. We had roughly about 6000 web sites down for about 20 minues while we migrated. We deployed several scripts to quickly change the IP’s and then DNS took its sweet time, that caused customers to see their site off and on for the next 24-48 hours. There were several different issues that had to be tweaked as they appeared, which some customers saw downtime. As of Sunday, October 14th, 2007 we were finally past the issues of the attack. It’s a big relief as some of us haven’t slept more than several hours per night to ensure things were getting done quickly, including myself!

I ask that any customer that is still experiencing issues with their web site not loading, please contact technical support at http://support.vistapages.com/, so that we can resolve the issue for you. If you have a ticket already open, simply reply to the ticket and it will be re-opened/updated on our end and an technician will resolve your issue.

What’s been done to prevent this from happenning again? 

Good question! I have been asked that countless number of times. Here’s what’s being done:

Newer, More Sophisticated Network Tools: We now have access to sophisticated network tools that can determine an incoming DOS attack and filter it out to prevent network slowdown. This does not eliminate the threat, it just gives us better information to better fight it off — “A good defence is a good offence”.

Better Backbone/Network: Our shared hosting customers are placed on the world’s #1 IP network by MCI/Verizon. It allows us better uptime, better control, better support. You’ll always get the fastest possible route to us, because of MCI/Verizon’s extensive IP network.

No more remote employee’s: In addition to our regular in-house staff, we use to hire remote staff to handle odd hours, weekends and certain other tasks. No longer will we be employing remote staff. All employee’s will now be working under the same roof under the direct supervision of Steven and Myself.

Longer Telephone Hours / Phone Support: We’ve never had 24/7 telephone support. We’ve started with Mon-Fri 9am to 5pm EST and have extended it to Mon-Fri 9AM to 12AM EST. We will also be extending our telephone hours into the weekend. We are working out a system to provide emergency contact 24/7 in the event of an emergency via telephone, which should be in production soon.

Extensive Audit of Shared & Reseller servers: Our newly appointed team of network and system administrators will be working together to ensure servers are secure, reliable and running efficently. This may mean hardware upgrades to servers and customer migrations. You will be notified before any changes are made to prevent confusion and downtime. This also includes deploying a seperate set of servers to place high usage customers that cause issues for the general population of our customers. We suspend less customers and make other customers happy at the same time. It’s win-win. Some offending users may not be suitable for the high usage servers, and may be required to upgrade to private hosting, vps, dedicated or colocation.

The past two weeks have been a terrible time for us at Vistapages, and we understand that your web site being up and available is the utmost important to you and your business. I want to personally apologize to those that were affected by the issues of the past few weeks and re-assure every customer that changes are on their way to make hosting at Vistapages reliable & safe. For those who have intentionally harmed our company will be and are being dealt with legally and may face criminal prosecution, enough of the evidence is there.

I thank everyone for choosing Vistapages as their web hosting provider.

Sincerely,

Kaumil Patel
President, Vistapages INC.

 

New Billing System. Yep!

Posted on September 26, 2007
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Vistapages has seen great growth in 2007 and along with the great growth, we’ve been seeing some growing pains. One of the biggest issues we have here at Vistapages is our billing and the way it operates. We’re changing that!

In the past 4-5 months, we have been working on a proprietary billing system that will not only make things easier for our staff, but the customer as well. Here are a few changes that you’ll see with the new system:

  1. Centralized Login: A lot of customers have complained that it is quite difficult to remember all the passwords (service, support, billing, etc), so we’re combining everything into one. There will be one place to log into!
  2. Seperate Billing Contact: You’ll now be able to have a seperate billing contact along with a “contact” person for the account, instead of just the billing contact.
  3. Password Resets: You’ll be able to instantly reset your password and send it to the e-mail address on file, no more sending a ticket into support to get this done.
  4. Managing/Ordering Services: This will be all done from within your “Account Manager” to simplify the process of managing your services; ordering new, upgrading/downgrading, cancelling, etc. You will not have to contact sales or support to get this done, unless it is required by the actual service (some services need manual intervention).
  5. Better Customer Interface: We’ve noticed how confusing the billing interface looks to customers, the problem is, we didn’t make it! With our new system, it is being designed to be as easy to use as a microwave.

These are just some of the new features that will greatly improve your stay with Vistapages. Once the system, which is not named yet is released, you will continue to see modifications and add-ons placed on them to better your experience with Vistapages. We’re interested in hearing about what you would like to see, so reply to this blog post! We’ll take them into consideration!

We now have Intel Core 2 Duo’s & PHPSuExec.

Posted on February 6, 2007
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intel_duo.gifMore hardware upgrades coming!

We’ve always used the latest Intel products for our web servers, ranging from Pentium 4 to Intel Dual Core processors. We’re keeping up with technology and now all of our new servers will be deployed with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. We’ve been very happy with the processing power that their chips provide us, although now our bigger concern is disk I/O and storage capacity.

Not to worry though! All of our existing production servers, will be undergoing scheduled upgrades to be configured to be using hardware RAID-1. This will provide greater disk access speed as well as provide fault-tolerant redundancy. It will definitely speed things up for our customers! As we continue to upgrade these servers, we will be working on a centralized storage solution that will allow for scalability, reliability and of course increased performance. This will take us some time, however, once it has been completed, our customers will be able to reap the rewards of an enterprise class storage system.

PHPSuExec

Over the course of the last month or so, we have been upgrading our web servers to make use of the PHPSuExec apache module. All of our newly deployed servers will come PHPSuExec enabled. This enables PHP to run in CGI-mode, causing PHP files with insecure permissions and incorrect ownership to fail when being executed (this is a good thing). It allows us to keep the server a hell of a lot more reliable and secure, ending in maximum uptime. It also allows our system administrators to quickly and effortlessly find offending/abusive users, where as before it would take us longer while we dug through log files, sometimes not coming up with a result. Some of our most problematic servers have become some of our most reliable servers after the PHPSuExec upgrade was completed. However, there are cases where scripts will not, even with the correct file permissions and ownerships, execute properly, causing an “Internal Server Error - 500″. If you are faced with this issue, submit a trouble ticket (http://support.vistapages.com) and one of our technicians will investigate and may move you to a server that has PHPSuExec disabled.

Here is an article relating to PHPSuExec.

Thanks,

Kaumil Patel, Vistapages.com

New & Improved Customer Service Coming!

Posted on December 14, 2006
Filed Under VistaPages Stuff | 2 Comments

Yeah, I know… I’m excited too!

Another year has gone by here at VistaPages and we’re approaching almost 3 years of being online! I definately have to thank all of the customers for continuing to support us, without you, we wouldn’t be here today! Keep buying hosting from us, and I promise we will continue to work extra hard on providing the best service possible!

Everyday I hear suggestions coming in from customers, potential customers, employees, affiliates and even competitors (Yes, we’re friendly to one another) on how we can improve our customer service! I’ve been listening, and as the new year is approaching, I am starting to put together a newer, more user-friendly support center to help new customers and existing customers be able to find information that they need quicker. We will be:

1. Adding Flash-based Tutorials (Step by Step Movies) - This will show you how to use some of our control panel features in a step by step tutorial fashion, sort of like those “Video Professor” learning CD’s you see on TV. Sure the documentation is there, but what better way to learn something than to actually see it being done! Watch and learn!

2. More Knowledgebase Articles - We’ll be adding a lot more knowledgebase articles on most common issues/questions, quick fixes, tips, etc.

3. Tighter integration to our Online Support Community - We’ll be promoting the Support Forums a lot more to newer customers and inviting a lot of our existing customers. After all, other customers may be experiencing the same types of problems! Helping one another will add to the support experience; a living, breathing knowledgebase!

That’s not all. Communication is the key to success in any relationship, and we’re going to step it up a notch by communicating with our customers a LOT more! This blog is just one of the additions. Here are a couple of things that we’ll be launching:

1. VistapagesNOC.com Server Status/Updates - We’ll be providing a lot more information on what is going on with our servers and network. If there is a server down, you’ll know, and you’ll know why! We’ll also provide you with an estimated time of service restoration. Of course, we’ll always try to keep our 99.9% uptime and if you feel that we haven’t met our 99.9% uptime, shoot an e-mail to our billing team, and we’ll credit you a free month.

2. THIS BLOG !!! - What better way to communicate to our customers than to post on a blog. We’ll let you know what future plans are as a company, we’ll keep you up to speed with all events that arise and we’ll have a bit of fun! Not to mention, I will also be having one of my close friends, who’s been in the industry longer than I have provide some insight on the Industry! Let’s communicate; this is a start!

I’ve also been told that some customers think that we’re not doing anything to increase the level of customer service that we have. From what I see, we have some really good people working here and we get to every customer as fast as possible. We’re always aiming to be faster and better than we already are. I’ll invite those of you who doubted us to be the judge and if we’ve still failed you, let me know… I will see what I can do to satisfy your customer service requirements!

Thanks!

Kaumil Patel / President Vistapages.com

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