E2E Networks

Prices of Indian VPS server providers are not comparable with US based providers while we can match pricing of say linode or slicehost we certainly can’t match prices of every cheap VPS service provider in the world. Our un-managed servers do include all of the things mentioned below and we do offer sane basic e-mail based support ( or phone based in case of any emergency ) even for our un-managed servers :-

1. Operating system hardening (applying latest software and operating system updates)
This is done first time your server is setup but we don’t update it as new patches are released. After that it is customer responsibility in case of an un-managed server.

2. Setting up free virus and anti-spam protection for your server
Virtualmin comes with sane defaults on this one, we also setup DKIM+SPF for our clients gratis for the main domain, unless you already exceeded your fairly large quota of sane & gratis support in which case it would be another Rs. 1000/- or so one time.

3. Custom firewall and intrusion detection system with automatic email alerts
Not included, firewalls are not very useful according to us, the assumption that you are running something vulnerable on any of the open ports is generally not true anymore on the Internet so the focus of exploits has shifted to open ports like http, ftp, smtp or ssh. The hostbased firewall ( iptables ) can be configured through webmin control panel or we can do it for you if required. Threat filtering on HTTP protocol by even dedicated appliances can make your website slow for end users and leave you vulnerable to DoS attacks, it is better to fix application vulnerabilities by following the best practices.

4. Performance tuning using in-memory caching available on Apache, MySQL and PHP to make sure that you get the most out of your server.
We can re-optimize the VPS configuration for Apache/MySQL etc. once or twice in a year based on your particular load/traffic characteristics. We’ll ofcourse never refuse to look into a server if a client asks us even to seek advice.

5. Free Installation and setup of various unix softwares where we spend less than 5-10 minutes of our time. Free manual reboots.

6. Optimizing your server control panel to make sure that your server is secure and functional (private DNS setup, hostnames, server contacts, log settings, etc)
We also welcome all feedback here from our clients and most likely any feature requests you make would make into the control panel eventually

Only for our managed customers

7. Server monitoring and SMS alerts using Zabbix. 24×7 monitoring of CPU, Memory, Disk I/O, Network utilization. Patches and Security Updates. Human intervention incase any of the operating parameters shoot off the charts e.g. CPU utilization
* Carte blanche from E2E management to offer memory/CPU/disk upgrades on the fly to make sure Run the Business tasks of a client are not affected for want of an upgrade approval within +33% of your CPU+Memory+Disk resources as promised in a plan, such upgrades are gratis and allow a customer not to upgrade a plan for another say 10GB diskspace or 256 MB of RAM . Upgrades are also done for our un-managed customers gratis sometimes but as a general rule we have a hands off policy with un-managed servers.

Un-Planned Downtime from 19:37 PM-19:57 PM
Emergency maintenance window ( 20:45 PM to 22:00) and actual downtime from 20:50 PM-21:03 PM and 21:09PM to 21:15PM

E2E Networks Delhi zone outage affected VPS and Dedicated Server customers due to router issues first noticed here. We apologize for the inconvenience to all our customers. We would like to offer a free 12 hours service extension to all our affected customers.  We still have more than 99.7% uptime on our services in totality excluding any service degradations or complete blackout events.

We haven’t yet completed the steps we promised during the last downtime to prevent a recurrence of the issue, this blog would be updated to reflect when that happens. We constantly strive to provide as much operational information to our clients as is known to us. We also promise to take proactive steps in the future to avoid any other type of issues.

E2E Networks Delhi zone outage affected VPS and Dedicated Server customers due to router meltdown. We apologize for the inconvenience to all our customers. We would like to offer a free 1 day service extension to all our affected customers. This is the first time we had a total blackout event since we started our services from 1st nov 2009, we have had 1 hour long downtime for E2ENetworks.com itself without any customers being affected earlier and also network degradation for about an hour due to reasons beyond our control. We still have more than 99.7% uptime on our services in totality excluding any service degradations or complete blackout events.

We are taking steps over next few days to prevent the repeat of the outage which would involve building router level redundancy in our network to prevent a recurrence of the issue. We constantly strive to provide as much operational information to our clients as is known to us. We also promise to take proactive steps in the future to avoid any other type of issues.

You don’t need to actually spam these days to end up on bulk or spam folder. It just takes a bit of patience to get out of there,  there is no magic bullet or red pill to do the job quickly and painlessly.  It is incredibly frustrating to deal with some largish Internet companies these days where the attitude is ‘our machines+algorithms are smarter than you’.

1. Don’t host your sites at spam friendly hosting providers. If you are on a shared hosting service don’t abuse the resources(and don’t host on a provider who lets other shared hosting customers abuse the resources).  Check against some known spam blacklists.

2. postmaster@ or abuse@ addresses of large e-mail providers do respond to your requests to whitelist provided
a) your customers opted-in to receive e-mail on the topic you are sending them e-mail, it is not ok to send marketing e-mails to customers who signed up to receive some kind of alerts.
b) make it as easy to un-subscribe for customers as atleast as easy as it is to hit the spam button, see point 11.
c) Honest mistakes(say your server got cracked and sent out a million ‘viagra’ e-mails) are forgiven more easily than willful spamming

3.  Requesting your customers to add your newsletter ‘From’ address to their addressbooks seems to help esp. with some providers.
4. Rate limiting number of e-mails per minute is a good idea otherwise its considered DoS type abuse of services by e-mail providers, most will send you to a tarpit .
5. Keep the lines of communication open at your own postmaster@, abuse@ addresses, list out a phone number for abuse complaints, listen to the bounces and customer feedback. Do not send e-mail from un-monitored e-mail IDs and rub it in by calling them donotreply@ or similar.
6. Logs are you friends, log all e-mail send actions in your web application.
7. Guard your reputation against joe-job accusations  by using one or more sender identification/authentication/reputation frameworks like SPF and DKIM
8. Make sure you have DNS reverse records for your MTA.
9. Never use a bulk mailing software from your home DSL connection
10) Most indian companies(job sites, mutual funds, banks, online travel companies  with a few notable exceptions, credit card companies and most of the social networks) don’t give a damn if a customer doesn’t want to receive their e-mails or SMS’es. Don’t be like them. Differentiate yourself
11) Add ‘a one click un-subscribe’, and ability to ‘delete’ the account of a subscriber by the subscriber herself from your web-service. A non-tedious one click un-subscribe not requiring a person to login to your site goes a long way in avoiding subscriber anger and consequent hitting of [this is spam] button in frustration. Also if one is running a social network, allowing a digest style bunching of invites/referrals/shares/ratings and other communication received over a day/week.
12) Get expert help and Contact Us