SoCal Websites

Spam can cause problems with exim when it is both incoming and outgoing. Recently, we started getting excessive resource usage notices for two different customers. At first, it looked like their mail accounts were being used to spam the server.

After further analysis, we realized it was actually that the domains were being bombarded with spam to their accounts. Exim was raising the server load dramatically, because neither account had the default address set to :fail: no such address here.

By using :fail:, “the email is never accepted into the server. During the initial SMTP negotiation when the senders SMTP server connects to your SMTP server, the sending SMTP server issues a RCPT command notifying your server which email address the email to follow is intended for. Your server then checks whether the recipient email actually exists on your server (a POP3 account, an alias or a catchall alias) and if it does not, it issues an SMTP DENY which terminates the attempt to deliver the email.” (source: ConfigServer)

These two accounts were being bombarded in such a way that they actually brought the server to a crawl by not having the default address set to :fail:.

So in your cPanel installations, you should make sure the default address is set to :fail: for all accounts to ensure a safe, stable hosting environment.

In WHM, if you go to “Tweak Settings” under “Server Configuration,” you can set the default for new accounts to go to :fail: and prevent high server load from mail attacks.

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Process Resource Monitor

When running a shared server environment, you must be extremely aware of activity which can take down your server. One rogue hosting account can ruin things for everyone.

While you should not allow an account to run poorly written scripts which create server intensive processes, a host should also not leave the server unprotected from scripts which will increase the server load and bog or bring down the server.

Enter PRM. Process Resource Monitor will monitor processes on the server and check it for exceeding resource limits which you set in the config file. To be sure it doesn’t kill legitimate processes, you set the number of times a process must exceed your rules and the number of seconds between checks for a process to be killed.

PRM will keep your shared enviromnent running smoothly and help ensure one account does not bog down the server for everyone.

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If you haven’t explored Google Apps for Your Domain or just plain old GMail, now is the time.

GMail and Google Apps for Your Domain capacity is now 6 GB. That’s per user.

Using GMail and GA holds many benefits. If you configure it from your domain’s registrar console, your email will work even if your hosting provider is having troubles. It means less downtime for your emails.

Also, emails do not take up space on your server or hosting account. If a user does not download messages off the server, spam will quickly multiply. I’ve seen over a gig of spam in one user account before! Depending on your hosting package, you could be scratching your head wondering why you can’t upload your 200k picture to your website.

The GMail interface for webmail is second to none. Searching emails, organizing emails, sending/receiving, anything you want from a webmail client… GMail powers it better than any other free alternative I’ve used (and I’ve used most, if not all, of the major ones).

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For the most part, I love Google Apps for Your Domain. Lately, I’ve had some issues which for me are pretty serious.

Most importantly, I am continually getting no love when I try to send email via Apple Mail. What happens at first, is that it looks like it is trying to send then several minutes later I’ll get an error message saying it couldn’t be sent and asking if I want to try another outgoing server.

Usually after this message, if I try again, the email will just send right away using the exact same settings. A friend of mine has reported the same issues with his Google Apps for Your Domain accounts.

And this problem does not seem to be limited to Google Apps. My GMail accounts are also suffering the same fate.

If you are having this problem, a temporary solution allowing you to send more quickly is to close Apple Mail and reopen it. Upon reopen, it always seems to send right away. Otherwise, you have to wait several minutes to get the error message before you can send again.

Another issue I’ve had is that my redirect for my webmail does not always work. All of my other subdomains pointing elsewhere work fine, but the Google Apps configuration has been frequently failing on me. If both of these issues persist, I may, sadly, have to leave Google Apps for Your Domain.

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You Don’t Need Web Analytics: “

How many saw that headline and heaved a sigh of relief? ‘Oh good,’ you thought, ‘one less thing on my to do list.’

Web Analytics World has 21 reasons that you do not need web analytics. Any of these sound like you or your clients?

• You don’t want to know where your visitors are coming from.
• You don’t care how much time visitors spend on your website.
• Most popular products? Who cares, you already know what your customers want.
• Dead Content? There can’t be any dead content on your site.
• Site overlay is overrated because you can pretty much guess which links visitors find appealing.
• Bounce rate sounds like a make believe metric.

(Via Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim - Internet Marketing Blog & Consultant.)

With Google Analytics being such a great price… free, there’s little excuse for not having top-notch analytics available for your site. Whether someone actually analyzes the data or not, at least it will be there when someone realizes the need.

Of course, there’s arguments to be made for having your analytics from the server rather than a javascript in the code. If you have cPanel, like on our servers, you have analytics built into your administrator. We still often use Google Analytics for our clients, but the server-side stats also provide the 404 not found errors and occasionally checking Google Analytics against the server stats can show if the tracking code has been installed properly on all the pages it is supposed to be on.

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If you haven’t upgraded to the new WordPress 2.2 yet, you can now do it through Fantastico. Login to your cpanel (yourdomain/cpanel) and you can upgrade in just a couple of quick clicks.

As always, be sure to backup your database prior to upgrading and thoroughly test your blog after the upgrade has been completed!

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If you are experiencing problems with Google Analytics (Problems started Tuesday around noon and have persisted to the time of this post, 2:22 PST May 23), you can access your data by using the old interface.

Evidently there’s a problem right now with getting the stats into the new Dashboard. This should be resolved with no loss of data since the data is obviously being collected (as it would not appear in the old interface if it were lost altogether).

I will comment when I see Dashboard working again.

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Google Analytics provided a much needed improvement to their system this week.

As a user since the beginning of Google Analytics, I can tell you that these new improvements are intuitive and provide easier ways to get the information you need.

Among my favorite improvements are the “Dashboard,” a customizable overview of your site statistics, the extensive scheduled reports via email, and a more intuitive organization to the navigation in the left column of the Analytics page.

Check it out.

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This is a safe and recommended upgrade for WordPress via Fantastico. This blog was upgraded without issue in a few seconds via Fantastico in cPanel.

Enjoy!

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The WordPress 2.11 update is now available through Fantastico.

As always, please be careful when upgrading, especially if you have heavily modified your WordPress install.

If you are updating from 2.1, this should be a problem-free upgrade. This blog was updated via Fantastico in just a few seconds.

UPDATE: Do not upgrade to this version of WordPress. There was a security breach and it could be a faulty build. Though it is unlikely that Fantasico installs of WordPress are affected, it is better to be on the safe side and not upgrade yet.

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