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!
 

“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.

The Vistapages Web Hosting Blog Launched!

Posted on December 14, 2006
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A long time coming!

Yes! It’s finally here! I’ve been meaning to get this blog up and running for quite a while now, and have finally had the time to put it together! The purpose of this blog is to basically be able to communicate to all of our customers, and potential customers about the on-goings here at VistaPages, as well as provide some insight to what is happening around the Industry!

This is one of the many new things that will be popping up here at VistaPages, and trust me it’s only going to get better!

I think that’s good enough for my first post here :D

 

Kaumil Patel / President Vistapages.com

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