Windows 7, PHP and MySQL

The traditional model which the large majority of hosting companies use goes something like this; buy an inexpensive server, install basic software on it (php, mysql, mailenable etc..), make a copy of all you have done, swamp it with hundreds and hundreds of customers websites. When the server becomes full buy another inexpensive server and install a copy of the first one on it so all servers run the same software. It makes sense for the hosting company to do this so everything is standard – but what about you the website owner. You may have seen a really neat PHP trick you want to use and can’t because PHP version 5 isn’t installed for you. So you look to make a move between hosting accounts so you can have something supported but can’t because the system is inflexible. This is where our system differs…

Swordfish Scalability

The Swordfish Shared Hosting platform is completely flexible and scalable so you can easily move between our packages anytime you want.  If you start of with a simple shared web hosting account you can easily move to our range of Virtual Private Servers with no downtime. As your website grows and you want to make the jump from a VPS to your own dedicated server you can migrate seamlessly again with no downtime.

How This Helps You, Our Customer

By allowing you to seamlessly transfer between our hosting packages with no downtime you are in complete control of what software versions are on your hosting platform. If you are on our shared hosting platform and what different software to that which we’ve setup for you we can move you onto your own Virtual Dedicated Server quickly and easily.

In coming weeks we’ll be looking at discussing hot trends in web hosting, how to ensure your website has the best uptime and how to make the most from your package with us.

Some of the really common problems we face on a day to day basis is things like basic email problems, domain transfer questions and dns issues. The tools below are our favourite for checking basic information on these topics and best of all they are free to use for everyone so feel free to make use of them!

1. www.allwhois.com
allwhois is a great tool for finding out the whois information on a domain name. Who Is information is great at telling you information like when a domain expires, who owns it, who the admin contact for the domain is as well as what the nameservers are and is always a good place to start trouble shooting

2. www.network-tools.com
Network-Tools is a one stop shop for all things domain and dns related. It give you great information on basic things like whois lookups but also goes deeper to tell you dns information which can indicate why a domain isn’t resolving and can even tell you if your domain is on a blacklist for spamming.

3. www.mxtoolbox.com
MX Toolbox tell you really useful information about your MX Servers (Email Servers). It’s great at finding out information on them and also if they are on any email blacklists. It searches loads and loads of blacklists so you don’t have to!

4. www.whatsmydns.net
What’s My DNS is a useful tool for checking DNS propagation. As all you developers know when you change DNS / Update nameservers it can take 24-72 hours for the changes to take effect – this tool lets you see a map of the world and queries different servers to see if it’s updated yet.

5. www.dnsstuff.com
DNS Stuff used to be an amazing tool which everyone in the industry used to check all things domain name related. It probably is still a great tool but unfortunately a few months ago they started requiring you to pay to access their services. Still a good tool but it’s gonna cost you!

6. dns-tools.domaintools.com
Another great tool for checking dns, domain issues, mx records and whois lookups. Similar to network-tools really has a couple of good tools if you’re willing to pay for them!

7. www.archive.org
Yes this technically doesn’t count as a problem diagnosis tool but it’s really useful to see past versions of the website if problems occur on your current website. You can retrieve old text you thought you’d lost, see competitors and even grab images that were lost over time!

8. www.mail2web.com
Mail2Web is a brilliant free utility that lets you connect to your email box over the internet in a sort of basic webmail system. When you are having problems connecting to your mailbox this tool provides a great third-party view on if the issue is local on your pc or something more.

9. Web Site Statistics
This one isn’t so much an website which provides a tool but more a good place to start looking if you have noticed unexpected peaks in traffic or database issues / your dedicated server taking a while to load. Web site statistics like google analytics or the great ones in our plesk control panels let you know what files are popular and who is downloading them from where. Sometimes you may find that your server running a little slow is as a result of a file you placed online being linked to from a popular forum or a script your wrote being accessed by others who you may not want to access it. All our plesk control panels come with built in firewalls to stop this happening if you so wanted but feel free to contact us if you want help setting it up.

10 www.swordfishhosting.co.uk
Well we had to put ourself in here didn’t we! We offer free support to all our customers so if the above things don’t help you track down a domain / email issue then get in touch, our team is here to help 24*7

Swordfish Hosting prides itself on customer satisfaction but lets be honest you would hope all companies would pride themselves on that – the problem is that whilst some companies pride themselves on it, very few go that extra mile to ensure it, especially when it comes to VPS Servers

VPS Servers – The Stepping Stone

VPS servers are mini dedicated servers – a step up from having a shared account but no substitute for a dedicated server. Many people love VPS solutions as it has a great deal of the power and flexibility of a dedicated server (like custom server installs / control panels and settings) but without the price tag and perceived complexity. However VPS solutions still need looking after from a server administration point of view. Things like backing up, software updates and security overviews are now your responsibility whereas before on a shared environment you left that to your hosting company.

Whilst software updates and security overview are things that are individual to the needs of each customer by default our VPS solutions come patched and ready to go with built in firewalls and security audits all built into the award winning Plesk 9 Control panel. However most people still aren’t sure about backing up and if you own a number of VPS solutions backing each one up can be time consuming.

Swordfish Hosting VPS Automated Backups

This is where we differ from all other hosting companies. As standard we automatically backup your VPS once a week to external hard drives. We also maintain a rolling 2 week backup so you are only ever a click away from restoring your VPS – even if you have never personally taken a backup yourself. Sounds good doesn’t it!

Backup, Backup Backup!

Whilst we maintain a backup for your VPS it is also very important that you maintain a backup for yourself as well. Why? Well whilst we maintain a backup for you there are no guarantees with anything in life and in the event of a disaster recovery it’s also a good idea for you to have a backup to restore from as a first port of call. It might also be that you need to recover a specific file from your server which is easier if you have taken the backup yourself.

Why not view our great range of VPS Servers now and see how we can help your business grow.

I’m sure if you are visiting our website today you are doing so to compare our web hosting packages with our competitors and I can’t blame you – with some many hosting companies out there you need to make sure that you are getting value for money as well as ensuring the best reliability and scalability.

With this in mind I want to let you in on the VPS hosting trade secrets to let you better understand why we feel Swordfish Hosting is the best VPS provider around, bar none.

The first is about VPS server contention ratio’s. When you sign up for a VPS you get access to a virtual slice of a dedicated server along with other customers. Most hosting companies typically have around 80-100 VPS customers per server (although some very well known hosting companies, which shall name nameless, we’ve seen with as many as 200 VPS customers per server!!!) . Here at Swordfish Hosting we have no more than 50 VPS customers per server – the lowest around. We don’t even hide how many VPS’s we have on a server – if you have one with us you can ask at any point what the current load is and we’ll tell you!

Now you may be asking “but I thought VPS servers don’t affect each other” but in effect they do – we say this time and time again – there is no substitute for your own dedicated server. At it’s basic level a VPS server has one or a number of hard drives which means that if the hard drives are worked very very hard because the server the VPS’s are on is overloaded then things will go slower. Also if you have a VPS which is overloaded and all the sites are quite active you hit the effect that the processor can’t handle all the processes at once  – hence things get slower and occasionally stop. This is why we never allow our servers to be overloaded with VPS customers ensuring you always have as much processor, memory and hard drive capacity as you need – 24*7*365

The VPS Hidden Settings

This is the bit they also don’t tell you when you compare VPS’s, the behind the scenes settings that allow some hosting companies to get away with overloading their servers. For instance compare our VPS package with 1GB of RAM and 15GB of Web Space with our competitors. You may say that they give exactly the same server spec as we do – unfortunately you would be wrong. Down deep in the depths of Virtuozzo (our virtualization control software) are settings where hosting companies can specify how many processes are allowed at any one time, how many http requests to allow and how many emails to handle at any one time. Other hosting companies impose strict limits on these settings meaning you never stand a chance to use all your memory or disk space as these virtuozzo restrictions prevent your website from ever getting busy enough. It’s almost like buying a ferrari and then limiting the speed to 30mph – you know it should be going fast but it doesn’t

Here at Swordfish are limits are almost double any other host. Not only that but we are the only VPS hosting company that if you hit one of these hidden limits will actively increase it before you notice (obviously to a point!!). If you keep needing more and more resources we’ll not only keep giving you more flexibility but we’ll also help move all your websites to one of our great range of dedicated servers when you take the next step up the hosting ladder.

Interested in talking to one our our support team about how we can create your perfect VPS solution? get in touch now!

]]> http://www.swordfishhosting.co.uk/blog/2009/09/comparing-vps-servers-not-as-easy-as-you-think/feed/ 0 http://www.swordfishhosting.co.uk/blog/2009/09/comparing-vps-servers-not-as-easy-as-you-think/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Swordfish-Web-Hosting/~3/gHGsoFohGQQ/ http://www.swordfishhosting.co.uk/blog/2009/09/spam-level-grows-above-99/#comments Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:38:13 +0000 AndyB http://www.swordfishhosting.co.uk/blog/?p=23

You’ve all been there, you sit down at your desk Monday morning at 9am to see that you have 2,000 emails waiting to download and knowing that almost all will be advertising the latest genital enhancement or drug on the market.

For our first entry on our new hosting blog I thought I would look at the current Spam rates we’re seeing across our network at the moment and how this is separated out. Over the coming weeks we’ll be going on to look at solutions to spam and things you can do to help win the war.

As I sit here I’m watching the Swordfish Cisco Ironport Anti-Spam Appliance handle the tens of thousands of emails that pass through our system every hour I’m reminded that spam is here to stay for the time being at least. The highlights of our current rates of spam go like this:

• Current Spam Rate:  99.3%
• Current Clean Email Rate: 0.7%

For everyone that has downloaded hundreds of emails on a Monday morning this isn’t surprising at all but still for only 1 in 100 emails to be legitimate is frightening to say the least. What we have found interesting over the past few months at Swordfish is how this spam is being dealt with more and more. Out of the 99.3% spam which is entering our system 99.1% of it is being stopped based on it’s reputation alone.

Reputation Filters
For those of you new to filtering emails based on reputation it works in a fairly simple way. If you send an email from a legitimate mailserver that mailserver will have typical characteristics as it’s designed to be a legitimate source of emails. These characteristics include:

1. It will adhere to SMTP standards of communications, header details etc…
2. A reverse DNS lookup – in other words when the receiving mailserver checks information about the IP address of the sending mailserver it’ll resolve to a domain name.
3. It won’t be listed on any blacklists (Well easier said then done!)
4. It has a good reputation score with senderbase (in the cisco ironport scenario)
5. Sending out emails to a specific domain slowly (as usually it will be you sending to a friend and so only one email is sent in a few minutes)

In a good number of cases where mailservers are receiving spam they are doing so via hacked machines or home user computers infected machines and so in all likelihood won’t have things like reverse DNS lookups or standard methods of communication from an authorised domain name and so is rejected out of hand. In addition the ironport reputation filter words by throttling incoming emails from suspected spam messages so as more spam comes in the more likely the ironport setup tags it as spam and rejects it.

The great thing about reputation filters is because it’s checking the reputation of the sender and not the contents of the email it’s extremely efficient and consumes hardly any resources to do. So whilst our Ironport filter handles hundreds of thousands of emails a day only a fraction require anymore than a passing glance.

Swordfish Hosting Anti-Spam
For £2.00 per month per domain you can have our 99.3% spam detection rate for your personal or business email. Makes sense doesn’t it? Sign up for one of our great web hosting packages and get started now

Welcome to a very short and snappy post welcoming you to the first installment of the Swordfish Hosting blog! We’re going to be covering all sorts of topics over the coming few months here including:

• Spam and what you can do about it
• Website Hosting and Website Creation
• A whole load of other things!!

If you have any suggestions please do get in touch and in the mean time stay tuned!