Dear Hosting customer,
I wanted to
give you a quick update on some of the things that
have been happening with ZeonHost this
last month. We
recently updated the control panel to the newest
version, which has added some new features. The upgrade took
us to newer versions of MySQL (4.1), SpamAssassin
(3.1), and ASP .NET (2.0), and
many other service upgrades and features and everything
is stable.
I
also wanted to talk about the changes with our
support staff.
I think now a
good time to begin to work towards a more stable
network and service. We’re going to be investing some
money and time into improving our architecture and our
overall quality of service to you. While
these changes will of course cost money, we think our
current prices are fair, and absolutely will not be
raising them – once we’ve implemented the new
architecture, we’ll be giving you more space and
bandwidth for the same great prices!
In
the past I’ve worked
with a good friend, Chris Marks, on our systems.
He will be bringing some extensive Linux and
HSphere experience into day-to-day operations to help
me focus on reliability for our systems. I'll be
focusing on some application development of new
features while he develops and integrates new backup
systems and some high-availability features. In
order to get better acquainted with you and our
set-up, Chris will be helping handle support and
systems administration functions and will have full
authority to make decisions about support and
services. I will be doing application development to
design and develop new features, something I've had
little time to do because I was too busy with support.
Over
the next 30-45 days, we’ll be doing work in the
following areas:
Security
We will be
adding several layers of security. We have already
installed mod_security on the
web servers to block potential website hack
attempts. We'll be adding a NetScreen firewall and
more server level intrusion detection and monitoring
services. There is no fool-proof system, but
the planned changes will be very proactive in meeting
our more complete security policy aimed at enhanced
prevention, detection, and recovery.
Backups
We are adding a 4TB
Rackable Systems backup unit to perform nightly
backups of your website, and twice daily backups of
your MySQL data. We’ll keep the backups for a minimum
of 45 days, and are aiming for as long as 90 days.
Support Staff
I have hired some
additional US based support and we will be adding a
1-888 number.
While Chris and I will be making changes that will
minimize issues, I think it will be
important to have a solid support staff in
place as we grow.
Servers
We are upgrading our
servers to 64-bit Dual Opteron Systems with a Network
Appliance Network Attached Storage backend. NetApps
are Enterprise level servers that will let us quickly
recover in the case of equipment failure. The Opteron
servers have 4GB RAM and Chris will be tuning them for
optimal speed for your site.
Spam
Filtering
We will
be utilizing the new feature of SpamAssassin 3.1 and
some customized scripts that Chris has developed to
allow greater filtering capabilities while offloading
the stress filtering does to a active mail server.
This should greatly improve the effectiveness of our
filtering technology.
WHY DO THIS? I’ve always
thought ZeonHost had the potential to be a great
company, and you’re the biggest part of that.
I’m ready to take the company to the next
level, and I want to reward you as well with better
service. I really want to make you a part of this
company as we grow, please let me know if you have any
questions or problems.
Craig Rose
President
