Author Archives: AndrewT

Keeping Your Login Info Secure

Your login information is the key to your hosting account. Much like your car keys, house keys, and ATM pin, you don’t want your login information stolen. We all know that a strong password is a good idea and that we shouldn’t be writing down logins on post-it notes next to our computer. Those topics have been well covered for many years. We’re going to cover a few of the less obvious, although equally important, aspects to keeping your login information secure.

Encryption

Login information should always be submitted over SSL. This is easily confirmed by looking for “https” in your browser’s URL bar. Extended validation SSL certificates, like the one we use for our main website, portal, and billing system, will even show up green in the web browser as seen below.

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Being Caged Up Isn’t Always Bad: CageFS

My wife and I are both dog lovers and finally rescued our first dog, a Golden Retriever named Carson, two years ago. Carson was a puppy at the time and we were determined to have a well behaved dog so we began crate training him from day one. As a dog owner, you have to understand that a crate (or cage) isn’t just a means of punishment. It is intended to be a safe place for the dog to escape to while also providing safety to the dog and your belongings while you’re away. As it turns out, Carson loved his crate and would even willingly take a nap in it on occasion.

Enjoying his crate aside from the tennis ball teasing.

We could leave the house knowing that Carson was safe and secure in his own environment. If we had not put him in his cage, things would have turned out differently. Continue reading →

Got Spam? Introducing Our Free SpamTitan Trial

Dealing with spam can be a frustrating and time consuming experience. As both ourselves and some of our client’s have found, cPanel’s built-in spam filtering doesn’t always cut it. Several years ago we began offering Postini’s email filtering to address these needs. Google bought Postini back in 2007 and is now migrating users to Google Apps. We’ve elected to move forward with an alternative, SpamTitan, to better suit our needs and those of our clients. The intent here is to provide a business class spam filtering solution to those that require it or are simply looking for something better.

SpamTitan offers a number of benefits over the basic cPanel SpamAssassin mail filtering:

Highly Effective – Anti-spam rules are updated hourly to help with the detection of current spam trends. Over time SpamTitan is also able to learn what is ham (not spam) and spam based on all of the emails that it has inspected.
Virus Scanning – All emails are scanned for viruses both by ClamAV and Kaspersky antivirus engines.
Message Quarantine – All emails detected as spam or virus infected are stored in a message quarantine that can easily be managed by each email user. This keeps dangerous emails off of your computer while also giving you the opportunity to inspect what has been picked up. Continue reading →

Malware Scanning of Web Content

Securing an online presence can be one of the most difficult tasks that our clients face. We spend a tremendous amount of time keeping a watchful eye on security advisories, applying patches, etc. just to make sure our servers remain secure. This is often very hard for resellers and web developers alike to keep up with.

For instance, let’s take your average WordPress based website. Not only do you have to make sure the WordPress core stays updated but you also have to do the same for all plugins and themes that are being used. It is very common for a WordPress site to have more than 10 plugins and a handful of themes installed at once. Fortunately, WordPress has a good interface for managing and installing these updates easily. Often times everything can be upgraded in just a few clicks. However, this still requires that someone login to the WordPress admin interface and perform the upgrades. For resellers managing hundreds of sites this can be tedious at best and it is easy for one to get overlooked.

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Goodbye Postini, Hello SpamTitan

Several years ago we began offering Postini’s email filtering to our clients. As you may be aware, Google bought Postini in 2007. Throughout this year Google will be discontinuing the Postini service and only offering the option of migrating to Google Apps. We tested numerous other spam filtering services and appliances during 2012 so that we could find a better suited replacement. In December we made the decision to move forward with SpamTitan. A key element in choosing their product, aside from the filtering quality, was that we could run it on our own hardware and thus have greater control.

Before we make SpamTitan service available to everyone, we want to get our existing Postini users taken care of. If you are an existing Postini user, you will be receiving ticket notifications over the coming weeks as we work to get you migrated over. For those that are not familiar with Postini, a forthcoming blog post will go into more detail on the features of SpamTitan and how it might benefit you. You might even get to try it for free!

Welcome to Our New Blog!

A lot of things happen behind the scenes here that aren’t necessarily announcement worthy. We wanted an easy way to share this information with everyone and finally decided that a blog would do the trick. This is intended to simply be an informal blog about the inner happenings here at Dathorn mixed with some industry news, security advisories, etc. This will also give us another opportunity to interact with both clients and non-clients outside of our general support duties. Please feel free to register and jump on in with your own comments!