We’ve had a vast majority of our (customers’) servers in the 56 Marietta Street datacenter in downtown Atlanta for a couple of years now. We’ve been pretty happy with the datacenter and its overall track record of being responsive to us and providing a quality service. However, we’ve pretty much filled our space at the datacenter and need to expand.

Idologic has chosen the datacenter at 55 Marietta street (yes, across the street from our current one) to expand to. This datacenter will provide Idologic with a lot of room to grow and expand over the coming years. We’re excited about placing our new servers in this datacenter (which is on the same network at the 56 Marietta location).

As company, in addition to providing top of the line customer service, we’re dedicated to offering our customers the best and latest technology available. Our technical team has spent a lot of time, money, and effort into designing our space in this state of the art datacenter. Some of the things this new location will feature:

- One hour of UPS power backup per rack (at full load), which can be expanded easily to 8 hours
- Filtered power
- A backup generator
- GigE private and public connections
- KVM access
- Remote reboot port accessThe last two features might particularly interest our dedicated server customers. The location will allow us to continue to grow and improve our offerings. We’ve already ordered all of the necessary parts. When they’re delivered, racked, and setup, we’ll be able to offer servers in this new datacenter. It’s exciting for us a company.For our current customers in 56 Marietta, there will be no migrations or anything. Your servers will stay there and will continue to operate like they usually do. This only affects new customers and customers who will be purchasing a dedicated server in the future.

We’ve begun (and have been successful so far) upgrading our cPanel servers to the latest version of cPanel, version 11. The move to upgrade was one that we thought and planned out pretty carefully. We are fairly conservative when it comes to major software (cPanel, PHP, MySQL, etc.) upgrades at Idologic, so we wanted to wait a while and make sure cPanel 11 was going to run without problems. We announced our tentative schedule in late August and began upgrading from there.

What are some of the benefits of using cPanel 11? Here are some that we’ve noticed right away at Idologic:

• Prettier. cPanel 11 is quite a bit prettier than 10. It has a lot more AJAX and a lot of UI improvements such as sorting and more drag and drop features. The interface is also faster.
• Resellers have enhanced branding features as well as faster / easier theme switching.
• There have been a lot of changes in the areas of spam handling and protection for cPanel 11. Spam is one of the biggest causes of server trouble at any hosting company and any improvement to this area is welcomed. In particular, cPanel’s spam handling has been optimized to handle a much higher volume of spam without slowing the server down (which is a good thing given the increasing amount of spam).
• New file manager. If you (or your customers) use the cPanel file manager, you will notice it has undergone significant changes.
• It is now much easier to install modules for Perl and other programming languages.
• The help section of cPanel has been improved significantly. There is also a getting started tour within cPanel now.

If the server you are on hasn’t been upgraded, don’t worry, it’s coming soon. So far, cPanel 11 has been working great (and we expect it to continue to be that way), so you only have positive changes to look forward to in the near future. If you have a dedicated server with us, please contact us and let us know when you’d like to upgrade. You can upgrade at your convenience (and if you’d like, not at all), but it is an upgrade we’re suggesting.

As always, if you have any questions whatsoever, we are standing by and more than happy to assist you.

Note: this is reposted (and updated a bit even) from our previous website however everything below is still valid.

As we are all quite aware, spam is a large and increasing problem on the internet. According to recent studies, up to 80% of all email is actually spam. Unfortunately, this is not just an interesting piece of trivia — there is a real cost to spam whether it be your time (or your clients’) in weeding through it or the extra storage and utilization on the server in processing so much extra email.

Note: for the purposes of this article, spam includes UBE (unsolicited bulk email) and email that contains viruses.

At Idologic we have been carefully watching various anti-spam solutions for quite a while. Given the enormity of the problem, there are a multitude of solutions available both for purchase (proprietary) or for free (open-source). Interestingly enough, many of the best proprietary solutions are simply well-packaged sets of open-source tools. Given sufficient time and understanding, a knowledgeable server admin can construct an anti-spam solution that fairly accurate while requiring minimal maintenance. A well-built antispam solution can approach 80-90% accuracy rates with no false positives or manual maintenance (i.e. someone to flag spam manually on the server every day).

Simply put, that is what we have now done.

You may have noticed that there is an “Server-Wide Spam & Virus Protection” option in cPanel. This is simply the front-end to a comprehensive sysem consisting of….

• ClamAV — a superior open-source virus scanning solution. Additionally, virus signatures are updated daily from a central repository.
• Exiscan — an extension of the Exim MTA which provides the glue for Exim to call other programs.
• Exim Advanced Configurations — this allows us to block certain well-known virus file extensions. You can always send a file through regardless of its extension by first zipping it.
• DNS RBL’s — that is, DNS-based black-lists. We currently employ 3 very conservative DNS RBL’s. Please see further notes on them below.
• Vipul’s Razor — a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network that is constantly updated by screened user contributions.
• Server-based blacklist and whitelist overrides. This gives us the ability to override any of the methods above on a server by server basis whether to allow or disallow email. This would be normally be done in response to a request via ticket where a customer needs to receive certain emails but does not want to disable all filtering.

While we have put a large amount of time into crafting a very conservative but accurate spam-blocking configuration, we do realize that some clients may not wish to have any filtering. Because we recognize this need, this system is combined with cPanel Pro to provide user-controlled opt-in or opt-out on a cPanel account basis. Here is a sample screenshot from cPanel showing the configurability provided.

Please note that CPSkins has stopped updating their skins and so is not compatible with enabling/disabling this feature (spam filtering will still be working….you just can’t use CPSkins to enable/disable it). You will need to use RVSkins or x2 as your cPanel skin. We would recommend RVSkin as being very feature-rich and configurable.

Specific instructions.

• For RVSkin, go to RVAdmin Skin Manager / Package-Feature Manager. Choose the Feature List you for the user whose feature set you want to control, find the feature ‘Server-Wide Spam & Virus Protection’ and enable it.
• For the x2 skin, go to WHM > Feature Manager > Edit Feature Set. Check the box for “Server-Wide Spam & Virus Protection” at the bottom of the list and save.

We have enabled the configuration above on all reseller servers and will set up dedicated servers/VPS’s by request (no installation charge).

Explanation of DNS RBLs

Given that there are several irresponsible DNS RBL’s (SPEWS & SORBS for example), DNS RBL’s sometimes get a bad name. Fortunately, there are several highly accurate DNS RBL’s available. After careful research, we have chosen to use…

• list.dsbl.org — tests for open relay SMTP servers and will only list a server if confirmed open.
• zen.spamhaus.org - SpamHaus is a well-recognized anti-spam service provided for free to ISP’s and webhosts. It contains the IP addresses of verified spam sources as well as servers confirmed to be compromised by illegal 3rd party exploits.

These 2 lists have a very low to non-existent false positive rate. For example, in over a year of live implementation in a large environment (80,000 emails/day), the Spamhaus RBL’s have had zero false positives.

Idologic does not oversell servers. Simply put, Idologic does not sell more disk or bandwidth than we physically have on each server. This allows us the flexibility to allow our reseller clients to oversell and keep CPU & RAM usage within acceptable performance metrics.

Why is this a big deal?
Well, let’s use the example of a reseller account with 1 GB space and 10 GB bandwidth. In this example, an account without overselling costs $10/month while an account with overselling costs $20/month. If you saw those numbers listed on 2 different hosting websites, at first glance you’d assume the 2nd plan costs twice as much for the same resources. But…..does it really?

Scenario #1 - Overselling Not Allowed For The Reseller
If overselling isn’t allowed, you can create (10) accounts with 100 MB space and 1 GB bandwidth. At that point you’re done. It doesn’t matter how much space or bandwidth the accounts actually use….you can’t create any more accounts unless you increase your account size. In most cases, you’ll find that with (10) 100 MB/1 GB accounts, you will only use several hundred MB disk and a couple GB bandwidth. However, all that unused space is wasted….you’re paying for it but it will likely never be used. In almost all cases like this, if a hosting company does not allow their clients to oversell, it is because they are overselling the server themselves (the server couldn’t handle both the server owner and the reseller overselling).

Scenario #2 - Overselling Allowed For The Reseller
Now let’s look at the other picture. If overselling is allowed to you the reseller, you create the same (10) 100 MB/1 GB accounts. However, after several months you realize that only a couple hundred MB disk and a couple GB bandwidth are actually getting used. So you create another (10) 100 MB/1 GB accounts as new clients come in the door. Over time, you might actually squeeze 20-30 accounts into that reseller account. If you didn’t have overselling capability, you’d be paying 2-3 times more for this capability. We have found that Idologic customers regularly stretch their accounts much further than other seemingly lower priced hosting companies while maintaining higher speed and reliability.

Conclusion
So….in the cases above if you want to create (30) 100 MB/1 GB accounts and overselling isn’t allowed, it will cost you $30/month. However, if you got the account with overselling, you could likely do that for $20/month.

Simply put, Idologic charges you for the resources you actually use rather than the resources you allocate.

But what if…. (growth concerns)
Now here’s where some people say “Ah ha, I’ve got you now! What happens when you actually run out of space?” Well, if you’ve been watching your account and notice that you’re starting to use up all your space or bandwidth, simply put in a support ticket and we’ll upgrade you on the same server (we always keep a large reserve of disk/bandwidth to allow our clients to grow). If you need more space and bandwidth than is available on your current server, we’ll either move your whole account to a new server (with virtually no downtime) or open a second account on another server and move individual accounts between servers for you.