Guys,

We get excited about a lot of things around here because so many cool and notable events happen at SingleHop every week. In the past few weeks, though, there has been an air of utter awe and delight going around. In fact, I don’t believe I have ever noticed our team of experienced technicians this excited about a new product like they are about Ksplice Uptrack. Ksplice, in short, allows for any Linux server to be updated on the go. It’s like a race car needing a transmission changed and never having to do a pit-stop to fix it, it gets fixed without ever having to stop. Amazing!

With Ksplice Uptrack there no longer exists a compromise between security and running stability – we very often hear back from clients who excitedly tell us their server has been online for over 520 continuous days! That’s a great testament to the stability of our network and systems but it is a warning sign that the never-failing server is out of date and vulnerable to attack. With our never-satiated passion for innovation and cutting-edge technology, Ksplice’s offering of rebootless upgrades was much too hard to resist- and is now exclusively available to all our customers running Linux through our Kernel and OS package.

So if you are wondering how this magical piece of software works and want to see a real-live demonstration, sit tight because Andrew Brooks, one of SingleHop’s finest, has done just that in the video below. He will show you a server being hacked without having Ksplice, then the same server – without being REBOOTED – not being susceptible to the hack. Enjoy!

According to an article on theWhir.com, MarkMonitor.com released a report early this week that found phishing is at a two-year high. As most know, phishing is the process by which information such as logins, passwords, bank accounts, etc. are obtained by a malicious party representing itself as a trusted institution. This is done via various means such as spoofed emails and websites. Unfortunately, this seems to be the way of the internet: every step forward in technological innovation gives those with malicious intent more avenues to exploit.

From the article:

“With 151,000 unique attacks reported in Q2 2009, phishing attacks were at their highest in two years. Brands in the financial and payment services sectors were once again the top target for phishing with 80 percent of the total attacks reported in Q2 2009. Meanwhile, attacks targeting the login credentials of social networking sites saw a 168 percent increase between Q2 2008 and Q2 2009.”

I know that my spam boxes get several phishing emails each day, and I don’t have the time to report them, so I am guessing that the actual amount of phishing attacks is exponentially more than what is reported. Other than a heads-up, why am I writing about this today? Well as I mentioned, there are so many avenues for phishers to exploit, that they rarely do it above the board and sign up for their own servers, email accounts, Facebook profiles, etc. from which to launch their attacks. One of the major exploits is hacking into legitimate servers and using them to send phishing emails and host the bogus websites. This type of exploit directly affects my clients, and I deal with it quite often.

In my experience, the best defense is to keep the root or administrator password secure and make sure all of the software running on the server is up to date. As exploits in software are frequently found, the developers patch them as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this generally does not automatically trickle down to users of the software and manual updates need to be made. At SingleHop we are always looking for ways to offer the most protection possible to our clients. In the next few days we will be releasing one of the most comprehensive and powerful tools that maintains a server’s security without sacrificing its running stability. I know it sounds a bit crazy, but such a thing does exist and we will be the first dedicated hosting provider to feature this.

To find out more – feel free to contact us or keep checking our homepage for the announcement!

Here at SingleHop we are always eager to lend a helping hand to our clients to make sure they are getting the best experience possible from a dedicated web hosting company.  While our clients are busy making their businesses successful, we are here in the background giving them the support they need to grow.  This support happens from the moment they contact our sales staff for the first time.  So how does this activity look like from the inside? I’ll tell you, lets go on  a short walk down the SingleHop office …

A client’s first point of contact is with one of our account executives, who provide affordable solutions tailored to their specific needs.  Once a solution is agreed upon, the client is then sent to the account manager who gathers all contact and billing information in order to create the account.  The account executives and managers work closely together to ensure the client’s questions and concerns are met promptly as long as the client is with us – hopefully a very long time!

After the client’s invoice is paid, the data center technicians are notified of the new order.  They then begin setting up the server to the exact specifications requested, usually the server is already racked and ready to go, but for more custom solutions techs usually de-rack the standard server and modify it to exact specs. Once the server is finished being setup the client then receives a welcome email – many of you probably remember that.

Other SingleHopper’s hard at work behind the scenes are our leadership and development teams, finance lead and network engineer.  To learn more about each team member here at SingleHop, please visit:  http://www.singlehop.com/about/our_people.php

When one is just starting out, be it as a start-up company with a great new web application, a small business with a mostly static website, or even a shared hosting company, chances are a dedicated server is not needed right off the bat. Most VPS accounts will provide root access to install whatever is necessary for a web application and most shared or reseller accounts will provide all of the necessary tools to create a static web site and/or sell shared hosting accounts.

So when is a dedicated server necessary? Well, there are a couple obvious situations, and at least one that is not so obvious:

1. A site has gone beyond the resource limits of the shared hosting account.

This is one of the obvious times when someone needs to upgrade. If someone’s business exploded quickly and their shared accounts were overwhelmed because they had not planned on such growth. Every shared hosting account, no matter how “unlimited” will have resource limits that one’s site cannot breach on a regular basis. Generally, this is the reason for the “account suspended” pages one so often sees when browsing reddit, Digg, Slashdot, etc.

2. A web application has come out of beta and been opened up to the general public.

This is another obvious time to upgrade. Depending on the application, a VPS could handle the load while the app is in the testing phase, but once it is open to the public and starts to become more popular at least one dedicated server is going to be the way to go. Twitter is a good example of this, they started very small and have grown exponentially in recent months. Their infrastructure has not been able to keep up and has resulted in regular service outages.

3. Stability.

This may sound like a no-brainer, but it is often overlooked.  Hosting with a shared hosting account can lead to stability problems. It’s pretty simple: if one account is abusing the server resources, all the accounts on the machine suffer; similarly, if one account is being used to send spam and the server’s IPs are blacklisted, everyone suffers. I have heard horror stories of middle-of-the-day shared server upgrades that brought down hundreds of websites and then required a file system check when bring the server back online, and obviously caused hours of downtime during business hours. Even if a website is just a few informational HTML pages with some images, stability is a compelling argument for hosting it on a dedicated server.

There are of course many other reasons for upgrading to a dedicated server, but I think these three are some of the most common. Feel free to suggest any others in the comments.

For all of you who are going or thinking of going to the cPanel conference in Houston – October 5-7 – there is now one more reason to attend: SingleHop will be there! Make sure to stop by table 19 in the exhibition hall to pickup some SingleHop memorabilia, learn about all our new and upcoming products and services, and as an extra treat you will get to meet Pointdexter and some of his friends in person!

We will be there all three days of the conference, and we are looking forward to meeting any Texas clients, or wanna-be clients!

See  you there!

For extra information on the conference go to: http://cpanel.com/conference/09/