Our New, Improved Hosting Just Got Even Better!

Last Saturday, some criminals stole the email passwords for one of our hosting customers. They then used those to log into our shiny new hosting and send tens of thousands of spam emails.

The customer’s passwords were hard enough to guess. Unfortunately, they didn’t have to guess them: His computer was infected with viruses that simply gave the passwords away.

And the overload of spam caused problems, including clogging up our email and briefly bringing our web sites down.

There are a couple of ways to respond to such an incident. One way is to patch things up a bit and move on.

The other way is to do what I did: I spent 3 entire days doing a thorough security review and making numerous changes to enhance the security of both our web server and email.

The result is a system that’s more secure and more reliable. For example, I fixed things so that a repeat of such an incident wouldn’t cause the same kind of interruption to our customers’ web sites. I improved notification so that I’m likely to learn of such an incident earlier. And I blocked most of the countries of the world from ever accessing our email server in the first place.

In other words, I addressed the issues that caused the outage, and proactively went well beyond that, to ensure we have in place the best security practices we could come up with.

I also did as much as I could to balance security, reliability, usability, and performance.

All this is in accordance with our philosophy: It should work, and work right.

I was proud of our new hosting setup before, and I’m even prouder of it now. We are well-situated to expand the sites we host. If you’re not happy with your current hosting provider, give me a call. I’d love to help you out!

Update: As of 12/30/2013, I’ve done still MORE customizations and tweaks to make our web hosting the best, most stable, best-performing, more secure web hosting possible. I’m excited about the new hosting for a new year!