database design company domain name reseller: Thoughts about <b>web hosting service</b><BR>

A Featured web hosting service Article

Community Poll

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:18:50 +0000
Last week we asked what percentage of your site income do you spend on hosting and 60% said you spend 1-10%. This weeks question is…

How many computers or laptops do you have in your house?

None

1

2

3 or more

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For the month of MAY 2008, hostican uptime is recorded as 99.333% over the Internet. Lower than previous month uptime of 100% . There were some service downtime detected on 17th may 2008 that caused the uptime to fall to 99.333% only.

How to Migrate Your Linux Website to Another Hosting Company

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:48:34 GMT
A complete migration involves transferring the site data itself, meaning all the HTML and possibly PHP and MySQL files and CGI programs. You also need to modify the Domain Name System (DNS) information for the site and for the routing of the site email. DNS holds information that translates IP addresses to human-readable domain names. For Web site migration, the two important DNS records are the address (A) record, which tells the browser the IP address of the Web server, and the mail exchange (MX) record, which tells mail servers how to route the email.

Fighting Comment Spams - There Gotta Be A Better Way

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:35:21 +1000

SPAM! People usually associate spams with unsolicited commercial emails that try to either sell you the “little blue pill”, or Nigerians phishing for your bank account details. There are many techniques fighting email spams, either at the server side or at your email client. However if you run a blog or a forum on the Internet, you would also have experienced fighting comment spams (unless, of course, that you run a spam blog yourself :). I have been blogging since 2001 and have employed various techniques to keep the spams at bay. Some of them worked well — at the beginning — but sooner or later spammers got smartened up and they can almost slip in a few spammy comments.

When I launched this blog 2 years ago, it was running Akismet for Drupal, and recently changed to Mollom, one of Dries’ startup company/project. It has been effective (except for the last few days). Mollom is sort-of similar to Akismet that it (1) uses a classifier to determine the likeliness of incoming comment being a spam (2) acts as a centralised database to collaboratively identify spams. Mollom does a few extra things when the comment is in a “not-so-sure” state, but discussing this would be beyond the scope of this blog post.

Another interesting feature for Mollom is its Flex based statistics panel, showing the number of spams verses the number of legitimate comments. This is mine over the last 12 days:

Spam comments from Mollom

As you can see the ratio between noise and signal is huge — there are many more spams than real comments. By the way, even for many real comments I am still not so sure about their legitimacy especially those one liner generic comments. As you can see there was a big jump today, because quite a few spams slipped through.

Although the ratio seems to be inline with most studies online, it still surprises me, when I compare it with the SNR of my email spams. I am running my main MTA at home with Postfix 2.4, and spams are filtered with DSPAM, a fast and light-weight email classification system that yields pretty good result (99.12% currently for my account). Here is the analysis graph over the same period of time (generated by dspam-web).

Spam emails from DSPAM

As you can see from the graph — there are only around 20% more email spams than legitimate emails! Not huge difference in the case of this blog’s comment vs. spams.

Now, do we actually get relatively less email spams than comment spams? Not really. But what we do have is better email-spam fighting techniques that block out most email spams before they reach the classifying system (DSPAM in this case). Therefore what DSPAM gets is already a filtered subset of all the incoming email spams. A few techniques deployed:

Greylisting (see my previous article on this subject). I actually don’t put greylisting on my primary MX anymore due to undesirable delay. However I found by putting greylisting on my secondary MX it is just about as effective, as most spambots pick the last MX entry in DNS to send spam to.

DNS-related filtering. For example ensuring sender has a FQDN, and a valid hostname, etc. I am surprised to see how many spams are actually filled with invalid sender addresses.

That’s about it, but many people I know also employ RBL, domain-key, etc. At least in my case they have effectively reduced the work for the classifier, which also result less spam getting into my INBOX at the end.

There gotta be a better way to fight comment spams — something between the web server and the actual application that filters out the obvious spams. Bad-Behavior? Mod_Security? They also increase undesirable false negatives though.

Any more thoughts?

Today`s suggestion:

1and1 is providing Linux web hosting services, has been founded in 1997 and now
it's eleven years in business.

1and1.com average uptime is 99.994% (rank #812 on our directory) with total
83480 successful and 5 failed checks, monitored since 2005-09-19. Similar
companies with 99.994% uptime are and proservicehosting.com.

Search for "1and1.com" on 3 biggest search engines returns average of 210666
results so company name popularity rank is #41.

There have been 48 positive votes for 1and1 and 60 negative. And overall company
rank on our directory is #73 (similar companies are webhosting.com and
doteasy.com)

Web Hosting Packages

1&1 Beginner Plan (Type: Linux) - 10 GB space, 300 GB bandwidth for $3.99/mo

1&1 Home Plan (Type: Linux) - 1200 GB space, 1200 GB bandwidth for $4.99/mo

1&1 Business Plan (Type: Linux) - 250 GB space, 2500 GB bandwidth for $9.99/mo

1&1 Developer Plan (Type: Linux) - 300 GB space, 3000 GB bandwidth for $19.99/mo

Some technical data about 1and1.com

IP Location: Schlund + Partner Ag

Blacklist Status: Blacklisted

Nameserver: NS27.1and1.COM

Registrar: SCHLUND+PARTNER AG

Server Type: Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
mod_jk/1.2.0

Website Title: 1&1 Internet Inc. - Web Hosting Services and Domain Name
Registration

Description: Providers of web hosting services, domain names, and email
solutions for personal and business websites. Services include Linux and
Microsoft hosting, domain registrations, ecommerce hosting, MS SharePoint, MS
Exchange, server hosting.

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Some bonus features 1and1 offers

If you're not completely happy within 90 days from placing an order with 1&1,
you�ll receive your money back � no questions asked.

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This is our humble presentation on web hosting service. Your reading it will add the necessary weightage to the presentation.
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