iWeb Communities: Blog

Once again, for the 6th time in 2009, the iWeb network is reported as the most stable and reliable, according to the Netcraft ranking, which measures the reliability and network performance of web hosting companies. NetCraft ranked iWeb.com 6th in its rankings.

With this 6th rank in Netcraft’s top 10, we can state that iWeb’s BGP network is one of the best, or the best, in the web hosting industry.

Be sure that we work hard to improve one of the best Internet network in the world

Once again, iWeb is in the top 10 of the most reliable web hosting providers, according to the well-known benchmarking website Netcraft, which lists each month data on lost requests and connection times.

It’s the 5th time that iWeb is ranked amongst the top 10 of most reliable web hosting company in the world in 2009. It’s the result of our excellent network, of our products, as well as our team of 178 passionnate of web hosting!

We will receive a new A/C unit, a Liebert XDC of 45 tons capacity in a few days, and it will be installed in the iWeb-CL colocation zone. This will add up to the 4 other Liebert System 3 of 20 tons, for a total capacity of 125 tons. The new unit is planned to be activated at the end of October.

After the installation and the provisioning of this new unit, we will proceed to the planned maintenance and cleaning of 2 Liebert. We must stop them completely, during 2-3 days, for their total cleanup. Because of the normal usage of this AC units, their efficiency drop every month and those 2 units operate at only 50%, with temperate raising by a few degrees at the southern entrance of iWeb-CL. Temperature is now 24-25 Celcius degrees in this data center zone, but this is still below the ASHRAE norm which advises 27 degrees.

With the new 45 tons capacity of the Liebert XDC, we can stop those units, without raising the heat in the colocation zone in iWeb-CL, and even stabilize the small raise.

If you want to know more about the ASHRAE norm, you can read this excellent article at Data Center Knowledge.

We ask frequently customers to send us a traceroute and I thought it would be useful for a few to know how to use this command.

A traceroute is the tracking of a packet sent to a server. During its route, this packet goes through several network devices (routers, firewalls etc.) and then goes finally at the server. With the traceroute, you can see the IP as well as the response time between each barrier (router, firewall…).

We use then the traceroute to check the problem between your computer and the server. We can see quickly where the problem is and fix it.

Here are the steps for Windows and for OSX:

Windows : Start > Programs > Accessories > Command Line
or Start > Execute > type “cmd”

The command is: tracert domain.name
You can use this command with an IP adress as well: 192.168.0.1

Linux or Mac OSX: Applications > Utilities > Terminal
or Spotlight > type “Terminal”

The traceroute command is : traceroute domain.name
You can use this command with an IP adress as well: 192.168.0.1

Web : You can also use this Web tools on domaintools.com.

For the past 10 weeks, the iWeb development and IT team have been working on integrating R1Soft’s “Continuous Data Protection” (CDP) solution and make it available as a flexible and add-on service for all dedicated server customers.

Dedicated servers can now be provisioned with a R1Soft data protection plan, with storage space from 10GB to 500GB, from as low as $15 per month. With a R1soft data protection plan, a backup agent will be installed, and starting regular scheduled backups, saving the server’s entire filesystem to iWeb’s fully-redundant, RAID-50 storage servers.

For customers looking to backup more than 500GB and/or to backup more than one server, dedicated backup servers are still available.

The main advantage of this new backup service is its continuous feature. While it might take a minimal time to finish the first backup, next backups will take significantly less time, since only incremental differences are sent to main storage servers. It also allows you to do bare-metal restores, which is restoring a system to a brand-new hard drive. iWeb also provides a management interface, accessible through the customer hub, allowing you to choose a scheduling time, choose files to restore, and set email notifications for successful or failed backup operations.

All in all, it’s a significant improvement compared to the previous solution used by iWeb. Customers get more control with the backup management interface. It’s also more flexible, since you can change the backup storage space in the customer hub.

This is a recommended solution for any server, to backup important data, and being able to recover from disasters. One never knows when there will be a filesystem crash, a hardware failure, or an attack by a hacker or botnets.

The service is available in the order process, in the software configuration section, for any new dedicated server order (except Mac Os or FreeBSD). For existing servers, you can add it through the customer hub. Installation (and peace of mind!) takes less than 24 hours. Also bear in mind that all the hard drive is backed up with this new service, so be sure to order a storage space bigger than the space you are using.

Add a R1Soft Data protection plan to an existing server
View our new R1Soft backup solution page.

As our followers on Twitter already know, we have unveiled a special promotion this month, with a total of 8 deals. Compared to our already very attractive offerings, we’ve added much-needed extras like additional bandwidth, RAM, better hard drives, or even an additional server.

• Budget Dedicated Server Deal: 3000GB bandwidth and 2GB of RAM, instead of the usual offer of 1500GB and 1GB of RAM, at an always low price of $69/mo
• Windows Dedicated Server Deal: 3000GB bandwidth, 2GB of RAM and 500GB Hard Drive, instead of 1500GB bandwidth, 1GB RAM and 160GB Hard Drive. Only $124/mo
• Dedicated Server + cPanel: 3000GB bandwidth, 2GB RAM, 320GB Hard drive. That’s double the normal offer, only at $99/mo
• Mac Server Deal: Get Unlimited Bandwidth for only $119/mo
• Unmetered Server Deal: 20Mbps Unmetered Traffic for only $149/mo, from the usual offer of 10Mbps
• Plesk deal: 3000GB bandwidth, 2GB RAM + Free Plesk. Get it at $99/mo
• Cluster deal: iWeb gives you a FREE database server, added to the web cluster offer, for the same price.
• Power Server Deal: A Core2Quad with 10.000GB bandwidth, 4GB RAM, at $159/mo. Compare to the normal 2000GB offer and 2GB RAM.

By shopping those deals, you save from $30 (cost of RAM, HD) to $200 (cost of bandwidth) per month on your order.

This means either you’re developing on Windows, Linux, if you prefer cPanel or Plesk, there’s always a deal for you.

Our IT team is obsessed with redundancy and providing a 100% network and power SLA, as shown here. One thinks and brainstorms about clusters, automated failover, redundant software and hardware that would make sure that there is no single point of failure. One recent example is the recursive DNS servers, which is now served by 2 geographically balanced fail-over cluster. Others worry about natural disasters, thunderstorms, fires, denial of service attacks, hacker attacks, etc.

For iWeb, we’ve been through all of those incidents. We had an incident yesterday though, which was a fiber cable cut.

This kind of incident is frequent, with the IT team drilled and prepared to face cuts, with traffic rerouted to one of the multiple other providers. The cause though was a very rare occurrence; which was in this case due to a squirrel which chewed the cable.

I have to admit squirrels weren’t forethought in the redundancy plan. We’re currently looking for the culprit, thus the poster… In all seriousness though, this incident proves that even if you spend weeks and months planning for 100% availability and 100% scalability, and doing functional and integration tests, nothing beats doing it for good to see how it performs in the real world … and to be ready for the squirrel!

Netcraft, a firm which measures reliability, uptime and network performance, has just published its ranking of the most reliable hosting companies for April 2009.

We’re proud to see that iWeb Technologies is ranked once again in the top 10 most reliable web hosting company, with 100% uptime according to Netcraft, in fact this is the 9th time we’re ranked in the top 10 (See our track records here). This award highlight the quality of our hardware and also the dedication of the iWeb staff on delivering world-class service. Congratulations to iWeb’s infrastructure team for reaching this quality of service!

This post is about making the world a better place for anyone on the Internet. How can we make it happen? Well, one of the first step is to get rid of spam. An old but albeit interesting study shows that spam costs $20 billion in lost productivity. That was in 2003; just imagine what the figure might be in 2009!

Of course, everyone thinks about 419 Nigerian scammers, about “health-enhancement” and get-quick-rich advertisements, which can be detected relatively easily by anti-spam filters.

The other categories we don’t usually think about is spam we generate ourselves. Marketing mail, customer notifications (think about the dozens of emails Facebook can send to you every day), newsletters sent to members or customers without any prior agreement, those are also spam. So, here are 5 simple guidelines on how not to create spam mail and make the world a better place:

1. Make sure your server is secure. You can read the first part of this guide written on the iWeb blog not so long ago. Make sure especially to disable ports and unused services: in fact, the majority of generated spam come from hijacked servers, operated by unaware and unsuspecting owners. Alternatively, you can ask us to do a security check on your server (if you have managed services).
2. Make sure you don’t have contact forms on your website. Hackers love to exploit contact forms and use them to send emails, on your behalf. Of course, you can use contact forms, but only if you can make sure that the form is secure, and that the person submitting the form is a real person. The next thing you know, your server will be banned and the server will be cut off by iWeb staff
3. If you have an application which sends email, make sure DNS MX entries are setup well, especially SPF records. SPF records are necessary to let email providers like hotmail or aol to accept outgoing generated email (see this guide to help you to setup your spf entries)
4. If you use mailing-lists, newsletter, or ANY form of mass mailing, make sure they are opt-in, which means that the user submitted his or her email voluntarily, and agreed explicitly to receive those emails. Do not for instance add the user automatially to a new promotional campaign or a different newsletter you’ve designed. They haven’t asked for it, and most of them will have the reflex to “Mark it as Spam” in their email client.
5. In the same spirit, if you send a mailing-list or newsletter, make sure there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the newsletter. The link should unsubscribe directly, without them having to log in or submitting again their information. CampaignMonitor’s anti-spam page can help you to see what you are allowed to do and what you can’t

Today is Earth Day, an opportunity to think globally on climate change, a sustainable future, and to think how our current uses & lifestyles impact the planet.

How important is being green in web hosting? After all, we are just moving electronic bits around, and it doesn’t look like the automobile or the steel industry. Still, a recent study shows that 78 percent of shoppers value green websites, which means that if you are doing business online (or even if you only have a simple blog), it’s important to enquire how your web hosting company view the environment and energy efficiency.

First, we do site-wide recycling in iWeb’s 3 data centers. iWeb also uses RoHS motherboards since 2006, which do not contain harmful substances like lead, cadmium, or mercury, as opposed to normal motherboards.

Of course, a web hosting company’s environmental impact is linked essentially to power consumption required to power the servers and utilities 24/7, all year round. To this effect, all of iWeb’s data centers are powered with renewable, clean energy, from Hydro-Québec, which produces electricity with from hydro-electric dams.

Since iWeb is also located in Quebec, Canada, we also need much less air conditioning to cool the hot air produced by the servers, as opposed to data centers that would be located in cities like Dallas or San Francisco.

Recycling, toxin-free materials, renewable energy, efficient power consumption, those are all the areas where iWeb does make a difference. Next time you consider purchasing a web hosting solution, do think about the green efforts of this company