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.

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.

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.

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

Full money back applies for first 30 days of sign up which means if you cancel within a month and you get the remaining period fee refunded in full. If you cancel after a month you’ll still get refunded the pro-rated amount but without the discounts.

As an example for someone signing up on VPS-HDD-S plan for yearly prepay

If you cancel before 30 days you only pay us Rs. 2.06 per hour(Rs. 1480/pm slab) the VPS was running.
If you cancel on day 30 we’ll charge you Rs 1480 for the 1st month and refund the remaining amount in its entirety.
If you cancel on say on day 35 we’ll charge Rs. 1850 + 308.33(for the 5 days) and refund the remaining amount.
If you cancel say at the end of 6months we’ll charge you Rs. 1655*6 and refund the remaining amount
At end of 9 months we’ll charge Rs. 1655*9 and refund the remaining amount.

We’ll refund you prorated amount based on the number of days you have used your VPS without regard to the monthly billing cycle so you get refunded for each un-used day.

Lets hope this is considered a fair policy and lets people take advantage of signing up for longer duration to enjoy the discounts without bother.

Why should it matter ?
If your site is hosted in US have you noticed the long delay before your webpages start appearing on the browser. While some of the other big media sites are ’snappy’ as in they start instantly loading up. This is because of the ‘latency’ due to physical distance from the datacenter where the site is hosted.

There is a lot of performance optimization that you can do with CSS sprites ( reduces the number of image elements to load) , combining CSS files, javascript minify, concat and at the bottom apart from other Y! Slow rules.

Dedicated RAM, sufficient IOPS and fair share of CPU are some other elements that need to be in place so a web visitor to your site is not queued for several seconds before she gets her first byte of your website.

Add to it hosting in India at < 85ms latency, it gets you another level of performance boost beyond these optimizations where you can aim for snappiness that only big boys in the media industry could hope to buy till now in India. Think a 200 ms per page element saving on load times. Google's research shows it is important to reduce latency of your webpages http://code.google.com/speed/files/delayexp.pdf

A lot of Internet players in India now recognize the importance of having their websites available at a lower latency for faster response times for the end users. The latency to US/German datacenters is around 300/270 ms which translates into several additional seconds while loading up pages of websites. The big players have always chosen to host locally in India despite the high costs long associated with hosting in India.

How do I find out if my datacenter/webhosting company hosts me in India
Assuming you are in India and if you are on windows use the run dialog to open up the command prompt by typing in ‘cmd’
ping
is your friend. As an example :-

C:\Documents and Settings\Tarun Dua>ping e2enetworks.com

Pinging e2enetworks.com [180.151.0.212] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=81ms TTL=54
Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=82ms TTL=54
Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=81ms TTL=54
Reply from 180.151.0.212: bytes=32 time=81ms TTL=54

Ping statistics for 180.151.0.212:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 81ms, Maximum = 82ms, Average = 51ms
Less than 100ms (milliseconds) ping round trip time is a good indicator if your webhost is located in India. More than 280 milliseconds is fairly a UK or US based host who remotely manages servers from India.

So I would really like to move to an Indian web host ?
Check out our hosting plans for dedicated servers and Virtual Private Servers

These are discounted prices for customers signing up before October 15th 2009. Customers who choose the current plans will always have the same ( or lower ) pricing available to them for their provisioned and running resources.

Un-Managed VPS plans:-
QuadCore Xeon CPU
HDD plans storage on RAID – 1 SATA-II disks
SSD plans storage on Intel SSD X 25 series
No INODE limitations for diskspace
Assured CPU always and burstable when more available.
Operating System – Any 64bit Linux Distribution among Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu
100 Mbps shared bandwidth

Hosted in Delhi Latency of less than 85 ms from anywhere in India

Un-managed
Dedicated Server plans:-

QuadCore Xeon CPU
HDD plans storage on RAID – 1 SATA-II disks
SSD plans storage on Intel SSD X 25 series
No INODE limitations for diskspace
Assured CPU always and burstable when more available.
Operating System – Any 64bit Linux Distribution among Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu
Hosted in Delhi Latency of less than 85 ms from anywhere in India
100 Mbps shared bandwidth
Setup Fee waived off on 6 month prepay
Setup Fee waived off and 12th month free if prepaid for 12 months

Addon plans:-

Additional Bandwidth

Backup

Managed Services per Server (Dedicated or VPS)
Custom Tasks are 30 minute tickets
Additional Tasks are 30 minute tickets

Service Tax as applicable to all the above prices.

Contact :-
+91-129-404-5792
+91-997-172-0550
tarun.dua@e2enetworks.com
sales@e2enetworks.com

VPS plans
The VPS servers solve the problem of CPU/Memory availability by resource reservation, carving out a fractional machine for you with full OS Virtualization using Xen/KVM supported by VT compatible hardware.
VPS hosting providers also don’t resist using larger but slower disks advertising the large diskspace they provide but failing to mention if they disks used by them are spinning at 15K RPM or 10K RPM and how many spindles per server have they added.

The speed of your application is limited by the slowest components on your hardware (real or virtual) which happens to be disk-subsystem. Stop worrying about the size of diskspace and instead start asking about IOPS available to you instead.