SWH Server Updates

If your site is hosted on our DirectAdmin server you will notice that the junk mail sent to your domain’s inbox get reduced by 90% or more. Why? Because we have installed SpamBlocker2 on the server level which identifies existing email spam signatures according to several common blocklists as listed here:

http://www.selfwebhosting.ws/emailblocked.php

BTW, that is where a legitimate email sender will be sent to when his or her email address is falsely identified. This way a legitimate user can send us a request to unblock the falsely identified email address - this may mean we add that email address into our whitelists or remove it from our blacklists.

Note that we achieve about 90% spam reduction without blacklisting any email or email domain on our local server - we are simply using those popular third-party blocklists.

To further tighten up our DirectAdmin server, we have installed mod_security which monitor HTTP traffic in real time to identify malicious activities.

With these measures employed, CPU usage by malicious activities can be cut down to the minimum so that your website loads much faster than before.

If you have any concerns regarding these measures, please let us know by sending us a support ticket at our helpdesk

Frontpage users report that they could not publish updated websites. Now the problem has been identified. However, while fixing this problem something unexpected has been encountered. Now the server is up but some sites have access problem to certain area. We are working on this and the issue should be resolved shortly. Sorry for any inconvenience that this might have caused.

Because the ever increasing problem of email spamming, we have decided to fight it on the server level. Why?

Because the spammers use all kinds of ways to send to any site hosted on our server - that is the case for any server. They do not have to know your correct email address to do this. Consider this….

Once you register a domain name, your contact information is listed with your domain name unless you hide it through a special private service that you have to pay extra to get. Your domain name and your contact info are there and anyone can access them using the whois request. They can harvest your other email addresses by searching for any text like “user@yourdomain.com” on your page - so do not put your email in text format anywhere on your website. They can sell your email address to others.

However, that is not the worse part for us, the web host. The worse part for the server is that they can use scripts to flood the server with emails sent to a non-existing email address at your site such as “whateverusername@yourdomain.com”

Their scripts can use a dictionary to come up with the part in front of the “@yourdomain.com” - they keep trying until the spam gets delivered.

Yes, you may not receive all these spam emails if you have disabled your catch-all email. But still the server has to take the load. And most of the times, the server hangs under heavy load and we have to reboot the server when this happens. Recently rebooting our servers become a daily task. Yesterday it complete crashed our server - if you expect to receive email from anyone yesterday, ask them to send it again.

We have decided to fight back!

On our DirectAdmin servers, we installed the SpamBlocker maintained by Jeff Lasman to fight spams headon and we have enabled it for all sites hosted on our servers.

SpamBlocker will check each email coming in and block it if the sender’s email address or the domain hosting that email is recognized by us or several third-party “blocklists” - we block it right away by bouncing a warning email with a subject “Mail delivery failed…” If the sender is indeed a legitimate client of your website but somehow his or her email has been blacklisted by one or several of the blocklists we use, he or she will find in that warning email a link to this webpage:

http://www.selfwebhosting.ws/emailblocked.php

and request to unblock his or her email address from our servers.

Let us know how this works for your site(s) hosted with us. Send us the email addresses that are blocked but you believe legitimate.

We have just installed RoundCube - a new multilingual IMAP webmail client.

To use it, just type access yourdomain.com/roundcube

Note that this web application is still in this beta stage. Learn more about this new webmail from here: http://roundcube.net