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Archive for the ‘Customer Service’ Category
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
While perhaps containing a not-so-real word, this blog’s title touches on a subject of confusion for some webmasters and web developers. The gray area comes to us in the form of web statistics as they relate to resource usage. In particular, this seems to apply to bandwidth usage. The confusion sometimes results in anxious tickets and begs the question: Where did my bandwidth usage go?
While not always an exactly obvious science, understanding your website’s traffic is not as difficult as it may seem. Perhaps the best (and most simple) tip when dealing with bandwidth traffic is to go directly to your statistics programs: AWStats and Webalizer. There are certainly other alternatives such as pouring over log files and third party statistics, but both these programs now come with both cPanel and DirectAdmin.
AWStats probably works more for examining page size and overall file sizes. Take a look under the Navigation: heading to see several links. The first is File Type, which shows the files that are visited on the site and their overall size contribution to bandwidth per the type of file. In my below case, PHP and HTML files account for the majority of the bandwidth (as they generally should) at over 6GB total. Notice the image type designations: PNG, JPG, and GIF. Depending on the nature of a site, images can be the largest bandwidth hog:
For example, take a given index page where a couple personal pictures have been uploaded for something like a business celebration or charity event. The size of the image will mean everything; if the pictures range in size from 2MB (2,048KB) to 3MB (3,072KB) and you have five images posted, you’ll use 10MB to 15MB each time that page is visited. (Now keep in mind we’re not dealing with caching, etc. here…) If you multiply that out with 200 unique visitors (10MB/page * 200 unique visitors), your website used 2000MB of bandwidth – or what amounts to just under 2GB. If that jumps to 1000 visitors, your website has now used 10GB of bandwidth. This, of course, does not include other items on the page. This simple example should illustrate how a few images or files can change the game. If you scroll on down one more section in AWStats, you can view the actual pages loaded, which plays into the next part of the discussion.
This is where Webalizer comes into play. Webalizer lists (in detail) the most visited pages (and files) on the website. Scroll down roughly half way in Webalizer and you’ll see a headline: Top 30 of xx,xxx URLs. Now the latter number will vary per site, but the title should provide a hint as to what information is provided. The section just underneath this one is helpful as well. Here you can see what individual files might be contributing to bandwidth consumption.
Aside from legitimate image consumption, often illegitimate image linking (aka hotlinking) account for the other major chunk of surprise bandwidth usage. Hotlinking is when another site links to your image. While not always carried out with malicious intent, this practice can have malicious results. This trend can be identified by heavy image bandwidth consumption or if images on less prominent pages are suddenly loaded often. If hotlinking is the issue, you will notice images listed in the Webalizer pages at the top with lots of hits and KBs used. To alleviate this, cPanel provides a feature to disable hotlinking or you could simply deny the offending site(s). If you disable hotlinking completely, then no one can link to your images off your website. For you DirectAdmin folks, you have to get your hands dirty in .htaccess and the tutorial at this link provides more information.
The goal is to understand more about where your website’s bandwidth is going in simple terms. These few simple steps can answer many questions and help you tweak your website to stay in budget or load quickly. As always, if you need the help, our helpdesk is a short email or ticket away.
Posted in Customer Service, General | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
 One crucial area of focus for Idologic Networks is uptime. We prefer not to pat ourselves on the back all too often, but we do possess quite the track record when it comes to keeping our servers online. Uptime is a function of many variables and it begins on a stable datacenter foundation which is supplemented by true server-grade hardware. (IE: We don’t stuff a glorified desktop processor in our servers!) The aspect of uptime that any good System Administrator – whether he or she oversees Linux, Windows, or UNIX – grapples most fiercely with is the software side.
If you ever updated your home desktop or laptop, you know exactly what we are talking about. Upgrades to the Operating System (OS) core virtually always require a reboot. If, as with a server, your object is to stay online as much as possible, this clearly becomes counterproductive. Contrary to the advice of your Uncle Al who refuses to update his Service Pack 1 installation, good security practice requires that a high-value target like a server be up to date. Your customers demand that security from you, you demand it from us, and we demand it from ourselves.
At the very core of Linux is something called the kernel. To keep this blog post short, think of the kernel as the brain and nervous system of Linux that tells it how to operate on the server. Patching this kernel with the latest security releases has always been a source of downtime. It requires a server reboot to apply the changes, and it seems like there is always a necessary update right smack in the middle of your busiest week or newest promotion. It’s not so much a problem when the reboot can wait for late at night or off hours, but it becomes a major issue when the reboot is needed quickly.
Ksplice Uptrack is the advent of rebootless kernel upgrades. This technology has been in the pipes for some time, and the good folks here at Idologic Networks maintained a watchful eye, ready to adopt it when the technology matured. This is a capacity that Linux possesses which really gives it a major advantage over Windows servers right now.
The basic synopsis on how Ksplice works is that it takes the vendor releases and converts them into hot updates (in laymen’s terms, you could think of it as a live update). The MIT minds behind the project put out a whitepaper on the subject if you would like to go into further detail, but this is the brainchild of a couple excellent observations. They realized that the vast majority of kernel upgrades simply did not need any need code and therefore required no reboot to be applied. To make a long story short, they came up with a system where they could apply the hot updates and forego the once-required server reboot for a very long time.
This technology, Ksplice, is coming to Idologic, as we’ve already begun implementing it on many of our customers’ servers. We look forward to entering a new era of uptime sans the annoying downtime that accompanies kernel upgrades. With Ksplice, we can schedule our maintenance and begin to do away with unscheduled reboots for kernel upgrades. As always, let us know at the helpdesk if you have any questions!
Posted in Blog, Business, Customer Service, General, Technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
In lieu of the tired old press release, Idologic is rather pleased to announce the introduction of MailFoundry to its awesome lineup of services. MailFoundry is the name for a new anti-spam and anti-virus solution that will indeed keep your inbox clean. We noticed that many of our customers were running into various issues with the existing cPanel software. These issues resulted in missing emails and general frustration with spam-fighting capabilities. We decided to find a solution and we think we’ve found the best!
So what makes this tool any different from other (non-working) solutions? As you may know, cPanel and DirectAdmin both use a combination of ClamAV and SpamAssassin to fight spam. The latter name gives you a good idea as to how the software works, it kills. Traditional spam fighting literally seeks out and destroys spam. The software relies basically on guesswork and a complex scheme of scoring to determine the “spamminess” (pretend it’s really a word) of an email. The obvious issue is that artificial intelligence concepts like this remain rather simple-minded; that’s not to say the existing software is ineffective or poor by any stretch. However, the existing software is made to handle the average shared account as opposed to handling larger amounts or particularly critical email correspondence. It will miss spam, and it may land a few false positives.
This is where MailFoundry steps in. The software is actually hosted on hardware exclusively devoted to MailFoundry, so this literally takes some of the load off of your server and frees it up for things like processing website pages. Beyond that, though, MailFoundry uses a system called MessageIQTM which is basically a system of real people who monitor global email. These folks staff a datacenter 24×7x365 simply looking at email and finding spam. (Good times!) This makes this setup pretty darn effective against image spam and other devious spammer tricks. In fact, the software catches 99% of all spam and 100% of all viruses. Those are pretty good odds for you non-gamblers out there. The really nifty aspect of the software is that it updates roughly every 5 minutes. As you can imagine, these details make it quite effective. It further boasts a one-in-a-million shot of a false positive!
This new MailFoundry service does come at a cost. We’ve managed to make it a very small one, though. Right now, you can protect 10 mailboxes (per domain) for just $1/month! We’ve created a handy PDF reference sheet for the software that you’re welcome to peruse. If you’re interested in signing up, please contact our helpdesk, which is available 24/7 for help and information! Feel free to ask questions in our forum community as well.
Posted in Blog, Business, Customer Service, General, Technology | No Comments »
Thursday, May 14th, 2009
No, there is not a typo in the title. Idologic is proud to announce that Subversion & Trac and Ruby on Rails are now available to all of our cPanel Reseller customers. These new tools are quite powerful, and offer some nifty features to developers. Both tools are easily accessible in your cPanel control panel.
Ruby on Rails is a programming language (Ruby) on a framework (called Rails). Chances are that if you host with us, you at least know what a programming language does. However, the concept of a framework might be foreign to you. Ruby is a unique programming language in that it tries very hard to resemble a written or spoken human language, as opposed to a complex computer language. Arguably, it succeeds at this task where others failed. If you want to know more about the language, we suggest checking out the homepage at http://www.ruby-lang.org/ to learn about Ruby. There are several helpful tutorials to get you started, and there are many books available at your local bookstore. Ruby further boasts a lot of local groups for those that are really interested because Ruby remains quite popular in the open source community.
Ruby on Rails is the next step; think of it as sort of an optimized version of Ruby specifically for web applications. Although you might not even know it, chances are that you already use websites that function through Ruby on Rails. The list includes: Twitter, YellowPages.com, Hulu, Backpack, Basecamp, and so on. As you can see, for this to be a relatively young scripting language framework, Ruby is already employed in some very demanding environments. More information about Ruby on Rails is available from the official website at http://www.rubyonrails.org/.
Subversion and Trac is a completely different animal. Subversion is what is known as a version control system. Think of it as a type of “time machine” for a script; it is a tool that enables a user to manage changes to a script over time. This is a popular tool for many developers because it enables the safe use of cutting-edge features. However, benefits are not just limited to developers, as it can be employed for any number of files that need to be modified and managed through time. Trac is a type of wiki and issue tracking system. The unique aspect of Trac is that it is tailored to be easy to use with Subversion. To fully understand this technology, check out the official sites: http://subversion.tigris.org/ for Subversion and http://trac.edgewall.org/ for Trac.
We could not possibly describe the merits of either Ruby on Rails or Subversion and Trac in a single sitting. However, from our terse descriptions, the high points are apparent. These features have now progressed far enough that they can be considered safe and useful in shared environment. They are now incorporated into all cPanel reseller accounts. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Idologic at http://helpdesk.idologic.com.
Update: Ruby on Rails is also available on the DirectAdmin servers; please update your client packages if you’d like to give them access to ROR.
Tags: Ruby on Rails, Service, Subversion, Trac
Posted in Business, Customer Service, General, Technology | 2 Comments »
Monday, April 27th, 2009
One of the topics that we frequently find ourselves discussing here at Idologic is Sender Verify. Pretty much your only interaction with this nifty little feature will be negative, because you will see this much-maligned error message: 550 Sender verify failed. This is the hallmark error that shows up when something doesn’t work; otherwise you would never even know this feature even existed, as it quietly hums along doing its diligent duty and keeping spam from your inbox.
Sender Verify works like this in a nutshell: It sends out a callback to a mail server when it receives mail to verify that the email address actually exists. This is accomplished by a series of checks that do simple tasks like check for a broken DNS setup or verify an MX entry. It’s a powerful tool for fighting spam because most spam has forged information and is not sent from a “real server” – yes that is one of those vague explanations, but put that on the shelf for now.
99% of the time, Sender Verify works just like it should. That is why you don’t even know it exists; email that should be delivered is indeed delivered and email that is spam and should not be delivered is rejected. There is no need for the resources of antispam/antivirus software to be brought to bear thanks to this utility.
When Sender Verify occasionally doesn’t work [when it should], it is typically a result of a different email configuration from the sending server. The tool functions by making the generally correct assumption that all mail servers follow a set of basic guidelines (which most all do). However, there are certain email systems out there that don’t exactly follow these guidelines for one reason or another. This does not make them wrong, nor does this make Sender Verify wrong.
These are the times that a support ticket is necessary. In order to help you continue functioning and receive the mail you expect to receive, Idologic, Inc. offers two solutions:
- Whitelist the “Offending” Mail Server. This is pretty simple; we grab the name of the mail server and add it to a special whitelist which will ensure safe passage of mail from that domain, as the actual sender verify checks are ignored. This is the recommended and most common solution.
- Opt your domain out of Sender Verify. This is the nuclear option, if you will. We will remove your domain from Sender Verify altogether. You’ll never be bothered by Sender Verify again, but the same is also true for spam email sent to your account. Spam amounts will increase. This path is for those that are concerned about Sender Verify or just are lucky enough to frequently find themselves in disagreement with Sender Verify.
If you need to use either of the two options, simply create a ticket with the helpdesk informing us of what you would like to do. Either option must be carried out by Idologic staff.
(And to let you in on a little secret, we are currently developing a tool for your Billing panel that will allow you to remove a domain from Sender Verify without opening up a ticket.)
I feel a bit like a broken record when I say this, but Idologic is always here to help. We will be happy to field any questions or assuage any concerns. Reach us 24/7/365 on the helpdesk at http://helpdesk.idologic.com/.
Posted in Customer Service, General, Technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
Folks, this latest press release from Idologic might just be on interest to you:
London, ON (February 11, 2009) – Idologic Inc. (www.idologic.com), a leading provider of Reseller and Managed Dedicated Hosting services, is proud to announce the launch of a new customer referral program, Idologic Connect™. Connect follows the proven Idologic model of unlimited potential combined with a truly rewarding experience for customers. Designed for any current customer to take advantage of, this program makes it incredibly easy for the launch of a completely new stream of revenue; this is welcome news at a time when the world’s economy seems to be slowing and a little extra cash is highly valued.
Idologic Connect is available for any Reseller Hosting plan offered at Idologic. In return for connecting your friends, coworkers, or customers into Idologic to purchase any one of the Reseller Hosting plans, Idologic will connect you with the entire first month’s payment. This is not an account credit; this is an actual one-time payout which will be disbursed after the account holder is with Idologic for 60 days. There is no cap placed on the amount of referrals made, so earning potential is literally unlimited. For example, with referring just five people, a single payout of $100 can be earned with just the smallest reseller plan available.
Jeff Gardiner, co-founder of Idologic, Inc., is excited about the new program and issued a statement. “The best advertising available is word of mouth and many of our clients recommend their business associates to Idologic,” Gardiner said. “This is our way of saying thanks to them.”
Idologic Connect can be accessed from the Idologic Billing Control Panel. The offer is extended to both existing customers as well as any new customer at Idologic.
If you have any questions about the service, please do not hesitate to contact us. We’re available 24/7 via the helpdesk, as always.
Tags: affiliate, Connect, Hosting, Idologic, Reseller
Posted in Blog, Business, Customer Service | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
You know, as a member of the Idologic customer service team, I must say that we are pretty darn fast when it comes to addressing and fixing a support issue (not that I am biased or anything of the sort). Actually, none of us are that conceited, but we work very hard to be the best that we can be for you. However, believe it or not, there are some things that you can do to make us even faster. Here are a couple quick tips for making your interactions with customer support perhaps a little quicker and more pleasant; these hold true for Idologic or any other service provider out there for that matter.
Check out these guidelines that will improve your customer service experiences, guaranteed:
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Copy and paste any error messages. One of the most helpful little tidbits that you can do is to post any error message. This includes those pesky and vague email errors as well as any 403, 404, 500, or any other ugly number that comes up instead of your website. While we can oftentimes scour the server logs for clues, a 403 (for example) might mean something as simple as incorrect file permissions.
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Explain as much as you are able in detail. Overwhelmingly vague statements such as “My site doesn’t work!” do not help anyone, yourself included. Despite popular myth, no customer service team employs professional mind readers (though we’re all working very hard on achieving that level of mental prowess all of the time). A good rule of thumb is to explain what you were doing when ‘it’ failed to work. Also, go into detail such as the following example: My website seems to be down. I have tried to reach it for the past 5 minutes yet only a blank webpage comes up when I should see my front page. You’d truly be surprised at how much more that second statement tells a customer service representative.
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Do not be shy or not admit that you were working on things before your website went down. Do not hesitate to note that changes we applied just before the issue arose or the website went down. If you can replicate the error, feel free to share that as well. Just remember that you pay us to help you in the grand scheme of things. We all make mistakes from time to time.
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Remain calm. This is not really an issue here at Idologic (because we have great customers) but always remain calm and explain things to the best of your ability. Support requests can be quick yet still thought out. One of the unique aspects of our own support staff is that every single team member would be at least a Level III member at virtually any other web hosting firm. However, issues vary and sometimes you may feel as though you need someone a little more senior. Never be afraid to ask for a senior representative when dealing with any company if you feel like your issue is not being addressed properly.
Posted in Business, Customer Service, General | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
Backing up data is perhaps one of the single most overlooked aspects of managing a website. Most often, folks will simply look for a host that offers some form of backup service and simply stop there. This is often nothing more than a cPanel backup downloaded only to another directory on the same server. That is not serious data protection from events like a hard drive failure.
Here at Idologic, we back up all of our servers on a true, nightly basis. (This holds true for both cPanel and DirectAdmin customers.) Each backup is then transmitted to a remote server — meaning that your data backup exists on an entirely different machine. On top of this, we retain several copies of a backup leaving you with an option to restore from yesterday, last week, or virtually last month (please do be aware that some backups may be less than 30 days old depending upon the schedule). Simply email our support team or drop us a ticket to have a backup restored when needed. This powerful solution makes for a great first line of defense against data loss. (Did you catch that? I said first line, the implication being there is at least another line.)
What most miss out on is that you are the second line of defense. Aside from our server backups, each user has the ability to create a variety of backups from your cPanel control panel. We recommend you making your own backups, as redundancy never really hurt anyone. This does not mean you need to make manually generating and downloading a backup a nightly prerequisite like brushing your teeth before bed. It simply means that it would not hurt to make the occasional backup when you make a major change to your website(s). This process can be done by accessing the Backup link in your cPanel control panel. From here you can choose which backup you want:
- Full Backup – This backs up the entire account and is used to retain a copy of everything under the account. Used often for cPanel moves.
- Home Backup – As the name suggests, this only backs up your home directory (the files contained therein).
- MySQL Backup – This downloads a backup of a specific MySQL database.
- Email Alias/Filter Backups – These backup the respective aspects of email.
It is very important to note that these backups remain on the server when generated (unless you specify otherwise for the full backup). This means that they will contribute towards your disk space used and that they’ll also be backed up in the next backup – so that first 1 GB backup file becomes a 2 GB backup file. You can see how quickly this can pile up. Pragmatically speaking, you will want to download your backup and then make sure to remove it from your account. This way, your disk space will not be used so quickly and your backups will generate much more efficiently.
Tags: backup, backups, cPanel, DirectAdmin
Posted in Business, Customer Service, General, Miscellaneous | 2 Comments »
Monday, November 17th, 2008
An exploited website is every webmaster’s worst nightmare. There is nothing scarier than logging on to a completely defaced website or receiving a notice from abuse that your account became a spammer and your IP was blacklisted. The thoughts begin to race from there. What about backups? Do I still receive all my email? Have I lost clients or money? This nightmare scenario (and the associated headaches) can be easily avoided if you take a simple step and make sure that your scripts are always updated to the latest version.
Web hosting is driven far by the wonderful engine of free and/or open source software. Scripts such as phpBB, SMF, Joomla, Drupal, and so on are freely available to webmasters in place of paid alternatives which would cost no less than a few thousand dollars. However, where the source of script is available to you, it is also available to anyone else. This even holds true to those who would like to cause a little trouble for fun, fame, a challenge or even for money. Aside from this, even a poorly coded custom script can be just as much of a security hole, so it is important to always stay abreast of things. Modifications for open source scripts are also yet another source of exploits. Many folks are surprised by this information, but it’s a good idea to know exactly what you are installing on your website. All it takes is a badly coded modification or outdated software and you’ll fall victim to the next round of attacks launched by a group of Turkish hackers or a 15-year-old “script kiddie” sitting in his basement and using software that he found in a backchannel IRC room.
With open source software, you have the benefit of a community that is constantly using, searching, and securing the script. Most of these scripts offer a mailing list, RSS feed, or news alerts about exploits. A premier example of this is the Drupal mailing list which sends out alerts for security issues both with the actual software and the modifications that come with it. The software that Idologic employs should also alert you when an update is available. However, some folks may choose to install their scripts by hand, and so our alerts would not be available in that case.
It is supremely worth the few minutes it takes to signup for these lists on the software website. These lists publish information that is vital to you. When a new version of software is released, it generally applies a fix or few to security issues. If you continue to run an outdated version, it is literally a matter of when (and not if) your website will be exploited. And trust us, you are going to lose visitors and customers when your website plants a virus on their desktop. It’s just not worth the headaches when you can do a few simple things to keep updated. We do encourage all of our customers here at Idologic to stay aware and up-to-date!
Tags: exploits, hacking, PHP, scripts
Posted in Customer Service, General, Technology | No Comments »
Friday, October 17th, 2008
 We’ve noticed an increase of folks having problems with being unable to access their respective server. We thought it would be worthwhile to clear the air on the situation so that you would be a little more aware of what goes on behind the scenes when this occurs.
All Idologic reseller servers make use of a firewall. Along with certain cPanel services, the firewall and associated services monitor various logins: cPanel logins, webmail/email logins, .htaccess logins, etc. and blocks a user by IP address when too many incorrect logins are made in a short period of time. In this case, the number is five(5) incorrect logins within a span of five(5) minutes. This is a temporary block, but it does last for quite a bit and can become permanent if triggered too often. So, if you forget a password, try it three or four times and then give it 5-10 minutes and try again.
This feature is in place for your protection. One of the most common forms of exploitation on the internet is what is called a brute force attack. In a nutshell, something (either a person or script) attempts to guess your password. The idea is that the attacker will guess simple passwords and a malicious user will gain access to your account and its resources. The problem comes in that most folks choose simple passwords so that they won’t forget them, so this is where a firewall comes in against this sort of action. The quandary is that more difficult passwords can easily be forgotten, and that might leave you locked out of your server until your IP is removed. This meant submitting a ticket in the old days.
In light of this, we here at Idologic have two new solutions to help you (and us) work with the firewall.
Firstly, we have a plugin to WHM which allows resellers to open port 3306 (MySQL) for a specific ip address to have remote MySQL access:
1. Login to WHM
2. Under Plugins, click “Mysql Firewall Configuration”
3. Enter the IP you would like to access MySQL from (your ip)
4. Click submit
Note: This only opens the firewall! You will need to allow your user access to the specific database in cPanel >> MySQL Databases.
The second feature is that now resellers have the ability to unblock IP addresses via their Idologic billing control panel. This means you won’t need to put in a ticket or contact us to remove the IP address:
1. Login to the billing site (http://secure.idologic.com/payment/)
2. Click “Firewall” on the right hand side
3. Enter the IP you believe is blocked.
4. Click search
Note: If you or your client is unsure about what their IP address is, a handy-dandy website is available: http://www.whatismyip.com.
As always, if you have any questions or problems at all, do not hesitate to contact our support department!
Posted in Customer Service, Technology | 9 Comments »
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