I’ve briefly outlined a few of PhireFast’s unique qualities. We use each one of these to create a quality-oriented and affordable hosting environment for you!

History

PhireFast has been providing hosting and domains since 2004. We are NOT a fly-by-night organization, nor are we new to the industry. Your data is in experienced, confident hands.

WHOIS lookup for phirefast.com - registration date: July 7th 2004

Entirely in the United States.

PhireFast is licensed to do business in the United States, every single one of our vendors is United States-based, and so on.

Uptime guarantee

We guarantee 100% uptime with our solid refund policy, where we refund 50% of your hosting dues for each hour of downtime that occurs. Two hours of downtime in a month, and your hosting bill’s on us!

LIVE uptime graph for our Lambda server

No reselling

We have direct relationships with our server vendors, domain providers, and more. We manage our servers and network ourselves for the highest level of quality control possible.

Robust Network

Your data blasts across our premium Cogent bandwidth, with multiple failover connections. Each hosting server features highly-available 100mbps uplinks to the web. We run our network at about 10% capacity, on average, leaving plenty of room for unusually busy hours.

Bandwidth usage graph for June 2010, displaying 10% average network usage. (Click for full size.)

True 24/7 support

Our helpdesk is manned by 3 people who take shifts of 8 hours each. 2am? 4am? No problem.

A staff reply to a recent early-morning Support Request. (Click for full size.)

We guard your data like there’s no tomorrow

We understand your data is precious, and often irreplaceable, so we have a serious backup system from R1Soft. Put simply, any of our hosting servers could completely fry and your data would be restored and back online in 1-2 hours. We backup your data every 4 hours – 12, 4 and 8 am and pm Pacific Time. Most other hosts tell you it’s your responsibility to backup your data, but we like to take care of our clients.

Your Backup Control Panel - included with each PhireFast hosting account.

Our packages are affordable

Our premier hosting package costs a meager $6.95/mo., with discounts for annual prepayment. It includes a domain name and everything you need to get up-and-running on the web.

No silly fees

What you see is what you pay. If you sign up for our $6.95/mo. package, we will charge you $6.95/mo. for life.* It is not possible to incur overage fees with us.

*PhireFast will charge a 15% late fee on invoices overdue past 3 days.

Overview

Wikipedia defines Uptime as a measure of the time a computer system has been “up” and running, but did you know there are different kinds of uptime? Did you know that many web hosts use this common lack of knowledge against you?

Types of Uptime

• Network lifetime: This is the type of uptime many hosts use to incorporate loopholes in to their advertisements and guarantees. Based on this measurement, a network can have 9 hours of downtime each year and still fulfill an advertised 99.9% guarantee! How would you feel if your site was down for 9 hours every year?!
• Set time frame: Most commonly measured annually, monthly, weekly or daily, this is the method we use in our uptime guarantee to assure a set, recorded number each month.
• Rolling period of time: This type of measurement is counted from the last X amount of days, usually the last 30, and is a constant measurement – never ending.

A live-updating uptime graph for our beloved "lambda" server

We use Pingdom

PhireFast uses and recommends a great, paid service called Pingdom. Their global network of monitoring servers measures and reports on each of our hosting servers. If you are interested in a constantly-updated uptime graph for the server your site is on, let us know!

When shopping for hosting

Find out if the host clearly defines the type of uptime their guarantees are based on. Do they back-up their advertised features in their Service Level Agreement? We do.

For the “techies”: Finding uptime

Windows
How: From command prompt, run systeminfo | find “Time:”
Example output: “System Up Time: 8 Days, 8 Hours, 30 Minutes, 17 Seconds

Unix/Apple OS
How: From a terminal session, run uptime
Example output (taken from PhireFast’s very own “lambda” server): 22:51:47 up 34 days,  6:39,  1 user,  load average: 4.51, 4.04, 4.21

What’s wrong with it?

• RED FLAG #1: For one thing, we don’t send email from abuse@phirefast.com, so why would a bounceback message ever come to it?
• RED FLAG #2: If this came to my personal inbox, I’d know if I emailed that rox-tech.com address, which I certainly have not and therefore should not have a bounceback from it.
• RED FLAG #3: Why would an error message have an attachment? That is not standard practice.
• RED FLAG #4: Even worse, the attachment is a .html file. For obvious reasons we didn’t open it, but there really could be anything in there – ads (most likely,) an iFrame framing a malicious website, XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) and so many more possibilities.

How to be safe
Prevention is key. You can be as slick as you want, dodging ‘internet bullets’ like Hannibal from A-Team, but chances are a threat will slip in to your machine eventually. For this reason, Windows and Apple users should have strong security software to make sure there’s a chance of stopping a threat, should one slip in to your system. We at PhireFast use and recommend Trend Micro, but any reputable, paid security software with good reviews should do the job. Ideal security software also has a strong firewall that blocks suspicious incoming and outgoing activity.

Summary
Remember that email bounceback messages should NEVER contain an attachment. Even if it’s a “harmless” .txt attachment, don’t open it – play it safe. If you ever see a suspicious email with an attachment, it’s more than likely something that can and will harm your system.

As a premier web hosting and domain provider, PhireFast serves thousands of email users throughout North America and the world in a security-oriented cPanel environment, with packages starting from $6.95/mo.

Links

• Trend Micro
• us-cert.gov – Report Phishing Websites

Until next time,

- Mark Mutti
Founder/CEO, PhireFast.com

Client Portal
Earlier today, we activated our new Client Portal, which consolidates your hosting services, domain features (instant registration, renewals and transfers), invoices and support all in one place.

We also now accept PayPal and Google Checkout!

We have affectionately named this new platform after our beloved mascot “Plame”. Current clients received an email (reaaaally) early this morning with their new log in information. If you are a client and for some reason did NOT receive this email, please reach out to us.

Social Networking
By popular demand, PhireFast has entered the realm of social networking, including Facebook and Twitter, but please hold your applause – we need your help. If you like us, please stop by and say hi, and help us grow our community of clients and friends!

Links:
PhireFast on Facebook
PhireFast on Twitter (follow us and we’ll follow you back!)

During these exciting times, we hope that you share our excitement about adding great new features. In the coming days you’ll see an Affiliate Program and Dedicated Hosting services, amongst other things.

Thank you for reading!

- Mark Mutti
Founder & Head of Support

UPDATE: The problem has been solved and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Tonight a serious issue has temporarilly affected many of our customer websites and servers. NO DATA HAS BEEN LOST, although websites, cPanel itself and SSH are currently unavailable. IMAP, POP3 and SMTP appear to be working normally.

I’d like you to know we are working hard to make sure everything is back up in a timely manner, and I will update as soon as possible, as information reveals itself.

Thank you for understanding, and thank you for choosing us as your web host.

- Mark Mutti

As usual, support will be available 24 hours a day, even during this Thanksgiving Holiday here in the United States. We are also working on expanding our livesupport (live chat) hours for your convenience!

For those who celebrate the holiday, we hope you have a fun and happy Thanksgiving, and as always, we are very grateful to be your web hosting provider. Thank you!

(Gobble gobble)

- Mark Mutti
Owner, PhireFast.com

After our own research, and communication with other web hosting and email providers, we have confirmed that Verizon has started blocking Port 25 (SMTP) access on their platform.

For many years, PhireFast has run an SMTP Relay on Port 26 for our clients facing this restriction from their ISPs, which until now has mainly only been AT&T DSL and Earthlink.

The Fix: Simply access your email program’s settings and change your POP3 email account’s SMTP port from 25 to 26 and you should be alright. IMAP platform users are not affected by Verizon’s switch-over.

The Reason: Many ISPs block port 25 to prevent the transit of spam on their network. By blocking access to this common port, one extra layer of “protection” (or so they say) is added to their network.

As always, please feel free to ask us for help by submitting a Support Request.

Thank you for hosting with us!

Just download and install the latest version of Pidgin. It will automatically upgrade your current version.

US-CERT Emailed today:

Pidgin has released a security advisory to address a vulnerability affecting libpurple. This vulnerability is a buffer overflow that may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code. Libpurple is used by multiple instant messenger (IM) programs including Adium and Pidgin.

IM applications that use libpurple may distribute it as a part of their security updates. Users are encouraged to update affected IM software as soon as possible. A partial listing of IM programs that implement libpurple can be found in the “What is libpurple?” webpage on the Pidgin website. Additional information may be found in the US-CERT Vulnerability Notes Database.

Excerpted from their email blast earlier today, new features include:

* Improved search and member list performance
* Date filter options for Active Content page
* Many improvements for Sphinx searching (i.e. ability to filter by forum, ability to search titles only, ability to group posts as topics, plugin functionality for modifying the query, and misc bug fixes)
* Ability to hide an application’s tab on the front end, while still allowing it to be publicly accessible
* Improved IP address lookup tool can now support add-on applications
* Portal option to not pin pinned topics for articles
* Added link to user profile when editing a member in ACP
* Added display of time remaining for suspended members when editing a member in ACP
* Spam Monitoring Service support
* Ability to control image quality for Gallery images (jpg/png only)
* PHP version 5.3 is now supported in IP.Board except for OpenID login method. We are awaiting updates from OpenID vendors.

These features look promising, and I recommend if you can, upgrade to it! The improvements to the search are worth it alone, in my opinion.

Also from their email:

You can download IP.Board 3.0.2 and any applications you have an active license for in the client area. As always, make a backup of your community before proceeding.

If you need a hand with this, let us know! We’re here for you, day and night.

Happy foruming! Thanks for hosting with PhireFast!