Now when you access your Control Panel, you will find several video tutorials built in to your Control Panel.

For example, when you visit the email setup screen, there will now be a button you can click to watch an email account being created!  No longer do you have to find the video to watch, it's right there in front of you!  How awesome is that!

SiteBuilder was upgraded to 2.1.1 to include some new functionality including:

• Fixed Feedback Editor.  The Feedback Form module now works with full functionality.
• Fixed Resellers Functionality.  Resellers can now have their own link that is anonymous.
• Added Branding.  Resellers can now have their own separate icons and text information.

SiteBuilder, which is an awesome method of building your own website can be found by visiting http://sitebuilder.activewebhost.com.

We performed a network upgrade, which included additional switches to provide greater redundancy.  Network security devices were also added.  The estimated time and date for this maintenance period was:

Tuesday October 18th 10:00 P.M. CST

You may have noticed brief outages but the maintenance period was as non-service affecting as possible.

SURBLs differ from most other RBLs in that they're used to detect spam based on message body URIs (usually web sites). Unlike most other RBLs, SURBLs are not used to block spam senders. Instead SURBL blocks messages that have spam hosts which are mentioned in message bodies.

In English this means that SURBL scans an incoming email for links within the email for known spammers web sites.

Spam detection rates are around 80 to 90%, with false positive rates of the different lists ranging from about 0.001 to 0.4%. We continually work to improve both the spam detection and false positive rates in a variety of ways.

SURBL - Spam URI Realtime Blocklists.

Neomail times out / expires it's session after 30 minutes of inactivity.  This was changed to 60 minutes for a balance between user friendliness and security.

Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications.  Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.  Install it today using your control panel and Fantastico!

We have completed installation on several new security features on the server.  Multiple new programs have been installed that help to further protect the server.  Naturally this information cannot be disclosed in order to maximize the effectiveness of the security measures.

SiteBuilder was upgraded to 2.1.0 include some new functionality including:

• Fixed Shop.  The shop module now works with full functionality.
• Optimized Code.  All pages now display much quicker.
• Alphabetized Categories.  All categories are now alphabetically listed.
• Selectable Templates Per Page.  You can now adjust how many templates you wish to see on each page.

SiteBuilder, which is an awesome method of building your own website can be found by visiting http://sitebuilder.activewebhost.com.

Months in the making, it's time to being moving ActiveWebHost.com forward with it's new design to compliment all the new software, features, servers, support, etc.

The original design was cutting edge when it was released, but sadly it had to go as we continue to rapidly grow.

We will naturally be making a few tweaks here and there with the new design in the coming days.

HostingCon in Chicago, Illinois was a great success!  Why was it so great?  How about...

• Conferences Sessions - Classes were geared to hosting companies that covered topics from sales and marketing to technical concepts, security and business.
• Keynote Speakers - The keynote speakers were...
  Sandip Gupta, President and CEO, Ensim Corp.
  Serguei Beloussov, President and CEO, SWSoft
  Pascal Martin, General Manager, Microsoft Corp.
• Booths! - There were many booths geared for hosting companies, from services, hardware, software, etc.

It was an awesome experience to see everyone, even competitors side by side talking and laughing with one another.

Thanks to everyone - it was a great experience!

HostingCon is the first event of its kind for hosting companies. 

ActiveWebHost.com will attend the first annual web hosting conference in Chicago June 6-7.  If you have any interest in meeting the staff please let us know.  We don't have plans to provide a booth this year, but plans are in the works for next year's conference.  You can read about the conference at http://hostingcon.com. 

A common technique for spammers to use is what is known as a dictionary attack on a domain.  A dictionary attack attempts to send email from a spam source to a random set of names on your domain such as bob@yourdomain.com fred@yourdomain.com harry@yourdomain.com etc. in the hope that one of the many hundreds that they try will get a hit and deliver their spam.

To counter this we've developed a Dictionary Attack ACL for the Exim mail server for free which automatically stops an active dictionary attack and also prevents further attempts to send email to our server from the spammers IP address.

What does this mean for you?  Less spam of course!  :)

SpamAssassin Rules Emporium, known as SARE, creates custom rules written by a group of SPAM specialists for SpamAssassin (SA).  SA is already installed on the server.  You can activate it by using your Control Panel.

SA simply marks an email as spam if it thinks an email is spam, but it still send it to you.  If it is spam, you simply delete it.  If it was a legitimate email, you can still open it just as if it hadn't been marked as spam.  SARE adjusts SA by making the rules a little tighter in experiences hands thus making emails marked as spam more accurate than ever before.

Vipul's Razor is a collaborative, spam detection and filtering network.  Through user contribution, Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalogue of spam in propagation that is consulted by email clients to filter out known spam.  Detection is done with statistical and randomized signatures that efficiently spot mutating spam content.  User input is validated through reputation assignments based on consensus on report and revoke assertions which in turn is used for computing confidence values associated with individual signatures.

What does that mean for you?  Less SPAM and spyware emails!  :)

All uploads to the server are now automatically scanned by anti-virus software.  All emails sent to and from the server are now automatically scanned by anti-virus software.

The anti-virus software is updated each night with the latest definitions.  Any scanned email that contains a virus is automatically purged from the server thus preventing the spread of the virus.  Scanning includes emails that come in to the server for your domain and emails that anyone sends out from the server (such as with Outlook, NeoMail, etc.).

Please note that it's important for you to continue using anti-virus software and anti-spyware software on your local PC in order to prevent infection.

An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure!