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.

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).

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.

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

Enjoy!