Behind the Scenes: Switches, VPN & RDP

As a continuation of our “Behind the Scenes” blog series I wanted to highlight some maintenance that we’ve completed over the past two weeks.

For starters, we’ve gone through all of our switches and have applied firmware updates as necessary. For the most part these were relatively minor but some did address potential denial of service vulnerabilities. Overall this helps us to avoid problems in the future and keeping up with new updates is generally a good idea anyways. These updates went off without a hitch thanks to our ability to first test them on equivalent spares that we keep on hand. Hardware failing in some form or another is simply a fact of life and we plan for this by building in redundancy and keeping spares on hand. We make sure to have full configuration backups for all of our switches should they need to be restored. On key switches the spares are even pre-loaded with the current configuration and powered on in-cabinet such that only swapping of network cabling would be necessary to recover from a failure. As great timing would have it, our data center also performed similar maintenance this morning on their networking equipment per our scheduled network maintenance announcement. This was likewise completed without issue. Continue reading →

Behind the Scenes: Off-site Service Migrations

There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes here to continuously improve our services so we thought it would be fun to share some of this hard work with our clients and make a new blog series of it. From time to time we will be posting what we’ve been working on here at Dathorn as we continue to strive for perfection!

As many of you know, the majority of our infrastructure and all of our hosting servers are located in Dallas, Texas. It is a great location that we’ve enjoyed through various providers for a number of years. We do, however, have a few services that are strategically placed off-site for redundancy and the convenience of our clients.

If you’ve been in the hosting business long enough, whether it be shared hosting, a dedicated server, or even colocation, you’ve likely been unfortunate enough to experience an outage of some sort. We understand that there is nothing more frustrating than coupling an outage with the inability to contact your provider because now their website, phone system, etc. is down as well. Most can be very understanding when it comes to outages but when you’re unable to even reach your provider to get an update or confirm that they’re working on the problem the situation can quickly become very stressful. Continue reading →

New SpamTitan Node

We’ve been utilizing SpamTitan as our replacement for Postini for about 15 months now. It has proven to be a top notch product that has given us and our clients great results. To accommodate our growing needs and add further redundancy to our SpamTitan configuration we added another node earlier this month. This new node is located in Florida as opposed to our main Dallas location.

Naturally, this provides greater redundancy if for whatever reason our Dallas facility experiences an outage of any kind. Although such outages are very rare, this new node would be able to pick-up the slack and queue emails until they could be delivered at a later time. This also gives us a separate pool of IP addresses for which we can build a good outbound reputation and further ensure delivery of all emails sent from our servers. Continue reading →

Paper Lantern Lighting The Way

cPanel’s X3 theme has long been the most popular cPanel interface for our users. Since it is developed and maintained by the cPanel developers it also tends to be the most reliable and bug free interface. In addition to the upgrade to Horde Groupware Webmail Edition 5.1, cPanel version 11.42 brought with it the first stable release of cPanel’s new Paper Lantern theme.

Paper Lantern

As you can see, this theme is quite a shift from the X3 theme that most of us having been using for a long time. It is a very simple, clean looking theme. This theme is still in active development so this is just the very beginning. Quite a few changes have already been made to it and these will automatically appear on our servers as soon as they make their way down in a stable release. You can sample the latest version on cPanel’s demo server here and you’ll immediately notice some subtle yet positive changes.

The latest stable release of Paper Lantern is available on our servers and can be selected by adjusting the theme setting within your WHM packages. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Quick Look: WordPress Security Plugins

Securing a WordPress installation is certainly not a new topic. A quick Google search will turn up a large number of guides on how to go about doing this. Many of these have great information already but this task can often seem tedious to those that are inexperienced or don’t have a lot of time to spend on it. Given that WordPress is by far the most popular script that our clients use on our servers, I wanted to quickly highlight a couple of plugins that we find very useful in mitigating various issues that we’ve observed.

Better WP Security

The Better WP Security plugin offers a set of very straight forward steps that you can follow to help secure your WordPress installation as you can see below. Continue reading →

Safe Web Browsing Practices

A couple of our recent posts have covered how to keep your login information secure and how to secure your local environment. In the latter we briefly mentioned how important it was to browse the web safely. Malicious content being served from a website is by far one of the biggest and most common threats to the security of your computer. The best advice that I can offer concerning safe web browsing is simple: trust nothing.

It should come as no surprise that browsing unsavory websites, such as those containing adult or pirated content, comes with risks of infecting your computer. Unfortunately this same potential exists with every single website out there. Some might think that since they are visiting a reputable company’s website that it is safe and that is not the case. Back in February NBC’s website was compromised and ended up serving malicious content to users. Just this past August the New York Times’ DNS was hijacked leaving near endless possibilities for attackers to abuse. Again my advice on handling this would be to trust nothing. Continue reading →

Securing Your Local Environment

A couple of months ago we briefly covered how to help keep your login information secure. Some of the biggest threats to maintaining secure login information are your own computers and devices (phones, tablets, etc.). It is unfortunately quite common for a computer to be infected and any login information used on it compromised as a result. Here are a few important things to consider which can help to greatly reduce your chances of being infected.

Patch / Update Your Software

This is the golden rule as far as security is concerned and there really is no excuse to not be keeping your software updated. Attackers are quick to target new vulnerabilities so it is very important that all patches be applied in a timely manner. The three main things to keep note of would be:

Operating System – It doesn’t matter if you use Windows, Linux, or even a Mac. All of them can be vulnerable and need to be kept updated.
Anti-virus Software & Definitions – Should anything get through, your AV software needs to be current so that it has the best possible chance of preventing an infection.
Browser Related Software – This would include your web browser of choice along with all plugins. Flash, Java, and Adobe Reader are all commonly targeted by malicious websites. Continue reading →

MySQL 5.5, PHP Updates & Zend Guard Loader

I know it has been a little while since our last post so I wanted to go ahead and post a quick update about a few things that have been happening behind the scenes here.

MySQL 5.5

For many of our clients, MySQL is a vital part of their website whether they realize it or not. Most scripts that our clients utilize depend on MySQL in order to function whether it be WordPress, Joomla, Magento, or any number of other scripts. Because of this, any changes concerning MySQL must be planned and tested thoroughly before hand to help make sure that as little service interruption occurs as possible.

We had long been running MySQL 5.1 without issue and although MySQL 5.5 had been out for some time, we opted to hold off on upgrading as a precaution. Without any dire reasons for needing to upgrade, such as patching bugs or vulnerabilities, we opted to take our time testing the deployment and planning it as best we could. We have been slowly performing these upgrades over the past month or so and on Saturday morning we completed the final upgrade of the last remaining server from MySQL 5.1 to 5.5. Continue reading →

SpamTitan Status Update

In just a couple of short months our SpamTitan service has already examined more than 16.4 million emails. There has been a lot of interest in the SpamTitan service since we launched it and the two most frequently asked questions are “Does it work?” and “Is it worth it?”. Well, of course it works. We wouldn’t offer it as a service to our clients if it didn’t work. It not only works, but does so very well. We even use it ourselves with great success.

Defining the “worth” of the service is something that each individual or business owner has to determine. Everyone has their own spam tolerance level and will receive differing quantities of spam. This is exactly why we offer a free 30 day trial of SpamTitan. You can put it through its paces and see if it is a good fit for you and your business. If not, it can be canceled without restriction and more importantly no money out of pocket. We don’t play games here at Dathorn, there is no fine print to worry about.

One of the best ways to show someone how well something works is to simply provide a working example. Here I have for you a prime example from one of our client’s domains. Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →