I have been dealing with quite a large number of clients, their queries and feedbacks for the past few months. The common thing that I noticed with all is the hurry to fix the issue concerned about the downtime for their business. We all undoubtedly hope for a tension free life, and why should a troublesome and complicated mail issue in your hosting drive you nuts???????

It is in this sense that the option Exim + cPanel becomes relevant. In most of the Exim issues that I handle, what I see in the end is loads of thanks replies admiring the advanced and unique features of Exim. I hope that I will be able to explain quite a few of the reasons for those happy endings!!!!!

Exim + cPanel provides you a tension free mail management. By choosing Exim you are configuring a reliable mail service to meet the specific needs of your site. Exim is a highly customizable mail server that is inbuilt with cPanel. One of the admirable custom feature of Exim is built-in filter processing, well here is an example of how a built in filter works.

Eg: Suppose you want to send mail to a mail address bob@bobcares.example.com and at the same time you want to save the mail to a folder “archive”. You can use the filter functionality here.

For example, for an Exim filter, the output
Deliver message to : bob@bobcares.example.com

Save message to : /home/bob/mail/archive

It means that one copy of the message would be sent to bob@bobcares.example.com, and another copy would be added to the file /home/bob/mail/archive.

Exim mail server along with the cPanel provides efficient Mail management. The various features integrated with the cPanel includes:-

1. Option to limit incoming mails to the server by limiting particular users or domains, thus minimizing unwanted bandwidth usage (Particular when bandwidth usage is not set to infinite).

2. Option to prevent users from receiving spam mail and potentially dangerous attachments.

3. Filter messages save messages to files or divert them to other addresses, or check them for spam or viruses and delete them if they do.

4. Option RBL , using this option you can configure your mail server to check incoming mail against the available RBLs ie. Real-time block list and blocks the incoming messages if the IP or hostname matches an entry. Thereby minimizing the threat of Spam in the server.

5. Integrated availability of SpamAssassin, which is an efficient Spam filtering utility.

6. Advanced Editor configuration where the functionality of the Exim can be further customized accordingly.

7. Supports SSL/TLS: It supports sending over SSL/TLS encrypted connections, which can be important if you’re using a wireless laptop and don’t want anyone sniffing out your mail login and password.

8. Secure your email system to prevent unauthorized use and maintain the confidentiality of messages.

9. Tune your server to give optimal performance in your environment.

10. Another feature that upholds the package is the unmatched debugging ease. Coming back to the daily issues (I have to add that much of the issues are simple and it just occurs due to some minor mistakes from customers end) whenever I notice that the mail server is Exim millions of bulbs starts blinking around, it is simply that easy to debug and fix. It also means that it saves your precious time in business turning those millions bulbs to million dollars in your business.

I hope that the above could help you to meet the features of the cPanel Exim package. In practical scenario the services offered by Exim is much more amazing.

Any questions?????????

We will be happy to hear from you..

About the Author :

Taniya Vincent works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. She joined Bobcares in April 2012. She loves reading books and designing jewellery in her free time.

Virtual Private Servers are the primary choice of customers who can’t afford to buy a Dedicated Server, at the same time need same amount of flexibility and control. This industry is facing a serious threat from Amazon and Windows Azure Cloud Platforms. This article is focused on running a VPS business which can compete with these cloud platforms.

A thorough understanding of the features that end customers looks for in these services and implementing them at much lower price tag is the key for running a successful VPS hosting services. Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. The key features of Azure are:

* 99.95% monthly availability

* Supports different OS and frameworks

* Instant deployment

* Instant Scaling of resources

* Pay only for the resources used

* Quality customer support

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud enables us to create a computing instance in Amazon’s network. The main highlights of these platform are:

* 99.95% availability

* Instant deployment and scalability of computing resources

* Web interface for managing firewall.

* Easy deployment using preconfigured images

* Custom configurations using custom images

* Pay for only the resources used

* Quality customer support

A normal deployment of a VPS server may take days with its regular routine of customer chating with the sales team, then another few days for the technician to set-up the server. Your website should provide the customers an option to create custom configurations, generate its cost and order it instantly. Providing predefined configurations and proper documentation of their pros and cons will also delight the customer. Once the customer has ordered the VPS, you should be able to deploy the server within hours.

Your plans should provide high availability. This can be implemented using high availability configurations like Xen Clusters. A lot of virtualization technologies offers high availability configurations.

Another factor is instant scaling or resources. The customer may be anticipating high traffic in in the next day and he may need to scale up the resource instantly.Scaling of computing resource can be done instantly in most virtualization technologies. An experienced support team can accomplish it in a few minutes. The only requirement is that you keep sufficient free resources in the hardware node. If the hardware node itself runs out of resources, you will need the DC technician to manually upgrade the resources. This can cause considerable downtime for server.

A web interface which allows the customer to login and perform tasks like viewing resource usage of his server, ordering new resources or servers etc will be an added advantage. The billing portal used by most hosting providers can be customized to implement these services unless you are using any third party applications like WHMCS.

Integrating a high availability configuration which provides instant scaling of resources coupled with quality customer support and competitive pricing will make the customer think twice before opting for Amazon or Azure.

The above is a very rough outline on Running VPS business competing amazon & azure , if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

About the Author :

Dipin.D works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in October 2010. He loves reading books and listening to music in his free time.

Blog edited by :

Appu Joseph Xavier works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves to watch movies in his free time.

what is a VPS?

A VPS or virtual private server which works by partitioning a single physical server. The Physical node consists of only one root operating system. Using software such as Parallels Virtuozzo or VM-Ware the same operating system can then be installed over the top of the Hardware Nodes creating multiple Virtual Nodes. These Virtual Nodes use the same registry and system files to maximize efficiency and minimise both memory and hard disk usage. This all allows for independent execution of the virtual servers without interference from the other virtual servers connected to the same physical server.

Different Types of VPS Services

1.Managed VPS hosting service

In managed VPS hosting service the hosting company supply professionals who are well trained in solving numerous kind of hosting relevant specialised problems, able to administrate and handle issues quickly. They also guarantee that your world wide web functions are at safe hands and let you able to concentrate on the other important tasks at the same time. Managed VPS hosting service supply 24/7 service to help you regardless of the location where you are located and time boundary. Further, they guarantee that your server is working actively without any issues.

2.Unmanaged VPS hosting service

In Unmanaged hosting service the hosting company will not provide any support regarding the issues related with software , resource , performance , troubleshooting or need general help in understanding server applications. The user is completely responsible for the management and troubleshooting of the issues caused in the server. Only hardware related issues will be handled by the hosting provider.

Advantages of VPS over shared hosting

1.Security

In the case of VPS hosting your file system is not accessible or viewable by any other customer, your files are ensured full privacy and security.

2.Control

In the case of VPS hosting, you are able to modify server configuration files, install applications or modify system software With administrative or root access.

3.Isolation

In the case of VPS hosting, You are fully isolated from other users and actions on the server. No other customer can slow down or affect your service.

4.Performance

In the case of VPS hosting, Your resources may be guaranteed based on your plan, nothing else on the server will affect the performance of your VPS

Why Purchase VPS Hosting?

VPS hosting is a package that gives you a big part of server for a web project. Most online web companies provide VPS servers only to several companies, all located on one server. So the possibility of bad neighbourhood common for Shared Hosting is incredibly small in case of VPS. Along with server safety you get nice amount of disk space, serious bandwidth, control panel, and a dedicated support.

A VPS server is a good choice if your project is already quite big and in the foreseeable future your site will have to host big amounts of media. For instance, your users will upload audios, videos, images or other documents that take much disk space. All these documents will stay on your server, so you’ll need more gigabytes for it. Also, VPS hosting can process more users coming to your web page.

The prices for this hosting type are quite moderate, but we advise you to check the reliability of any company offering you cheap services. Low price can cover bad functioning, poor hosting features or unreliable customers support.

The above is a very rough outline on advantages of VPS hosting , if you have any questions, we would be happy to talk to you!

About the Author :

Karthikeyan.S works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves reading books and listening to music in his free time.

Blog edited by :

Appu Joseph Xavier works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares in April 2012. He loves to watch movies in his free time.

When troubleshooting mail or attempting to discover the source of spam originating from your server, it is often useful to enable extended Exim logging.

It is a fairly easy task, and can be performed in a matter of minutes… Read the rest of this entry »

Long time since I wrote something. I had a spamming story left half way through. Let me get to the meat of it right away…

The first step in the analysis was ascertaining the volume of e-mails still in queue. I must say Qmail is really good in handling the mail queue effectively(when compared to exim).

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Last week, I had the privilege of migrating accounts and emails from Smartermail5.x off a Windows 2005 server to Smartermail7.x in a Windows 2008 server. I had very little experience with Smartermail and felt challenged, when I was assigned the task. Started the migration, and it seemed effortless and fairly simple. It was just a matter of copying files and folders from one server to the other. Much of the task was simplified, since I referred to a well written How To here

Even though the migration went on fine, I did face one major issue. None of the SMTP, POP or IMAP ports were accepting any connections and the result was ‘no service at all’. At first, I thought it was a firewall issue. I configured rules to allow all the needed ports in the server firewall, but the issue stayed. Finally, I could see that the service was still binding to the old servers’ IP address. This has to be manually edited in the mailconfig.xml file and once the change was made, a restart of the smartermail service did the trick.

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Hot on the heals of the vulnerability announced a few days ago, cPanel have reported another vulnerability in Exim.

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On 8th December Sergey Kononenko, discovered a vulnerability in the Exim mail server, that could allow hackers to gain control of the host server. Though initially thought to effect only packages for Debian, it appears to be present in all versions.

Read the rest of this entry »

No, I’m not talking about spam. Depending on the type of customers you host on your servers, they may have to send out bulk mails to their customers. If they’re not careful, they could get you’re server’s IP address blacklisted! This would be an inconvenience for you, and for the other customers you are hosting on the same server. Lets take a look at a few steps that can help you avoid that.

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Hey, welcome back! I knew you wanted to know more about deciphering email headers. If you haven’t done so already, please do go through the first part of this series. In this part we’ll be looking into email headers in detail and I’ll disclose what information they hold.

Read the rest of this entry »