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- Web host with best customer supports
- 1,500 GB Disk Storage; 15,000 GB Bandwidth
- Host unlimited domain names on one host
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- Special Promo: $4.95/mo for 24 months

 


Archive for January, 2009

Email Spam Protection at Lunarpages

For website owners that are not using spam protection, it’s very likely that your mailbox will be attacked by spammers. Drugs ads, scams trap, get rich scheme, email virus, Trojan files – you name it! It’s therefore crucial to run an effective anti-spam opeartions.

Lunarpages hosting was pretty effective when it comes to spam protection. Generally, email protection are divided into SpamAssassin and SpamBox at Lunarpages.

What are SpamAssassin and SpamBox?

Quoted from their own words, SpamAssassin is an automated mail filter that uses a wide range of heuristic algorithms on email headers and message bodies to identify “SPAM” (unsolicited email). The anti-spam system is specially crafted to identify and mark emails that score beyond your threshold (spam) measurements. An email’s SpamAssassin score is the sum of values given to certain known spam characteristics.

As SpamAssassin uses a wide variety of local and network tests to identify spam signatures. This makes it harder for spammers to identify one aspect which they can craft their messages to work around.

SpamBox, on the other hand, allows emails identified as spam by SpamAssassin to be delivered to a separate mail folder named “spam”. If this folder is not regularly checked and emptied, it may cause your email or filesystem quotas to be exceeded, resulting in a failure to receive legitimate messages. You can easily use IMAP or Horde/IMP to check messages that are routed to this box. If you wish to use pop3 to check the spam box, just add “/spam” (without the quotes) to the end of your pop3 login. (Example: user@domain.tld/spam)

How to enable SpamAssassin and SpamBox in Lunarpages?

The basic setup process is pretty simple as all you need to do is just a few clicks. To start, login to your Lunarpages cPanel. Click in the ‘Mail’ icon and look for the line named ‘SpamAssassin’. The link will lead to a page where you can enable/disable the spam protection system for your Lunarpages hosting account.

Enabling Spam Protection at Lunarpages: Step-by-step guide

Screen captures are shown below for your references.

Step 1: Login to cPanel and get into the ‘mail’ features.

Enabling SpamProtection at Lunarpages

Step 2: Look for the link named ‘Spam Assassin’.

Enabling SpamProtection at Lunarpages

Step 3: One-click activation for SpamAssassin and SpamBox

Enabling SpamProtection at Lunarpages

It should be aware however, further configuration is needed if you’re setting up Spam Assassin for the first time. Input of black and white list for your system is necessary to avoid accidental spam tags; and if necessary, you might want to revised on the default spam scores.


Lunarpages server migration

Lots of server migration happening in Lunarpages for the past few months and I guess we are seeing the final transfer early this year 2009.

Server boxes were moving physically from Los Angeles datacenter to San Diego datacenter. I can’t find any reasons for the move but the migration planning and progress can be tracked from the official forum.

Migration of server Isis, Seth, Tsohea, Felix, Deneb, as well as Ez-web-n-mail are reported in late year 2008.

Generally the servers being affected will be offline for 6 – 8 hours (for physical transportation). As the migrations are planned properly, I don’t read much complaints about the users site. There are, however, quite some change on the server IPs, Isis server for example, switch to a new IP as: 67.210.119.235 IN PTR isis.fastsecureservers.com.

Server software upgrades

Folks at Lunarpages are also taking the chance to upgrade their software. Quoting fully from the forum post, these are the list of software being upgraded:

Apache to 1.3.41 if it wasn’t already this version
PHP4 to PHP 4.4.9
PHP5 when applicable to PHP 5.2.6
MySQL to MySQL 5.0.51a
Ruby when applicable to Ruby 1.8.6 newest patched release
Zend Optimizer to 3.3.3
ImageMagick to 6.4.3
IonCube to 3.1.32
ffmpeg when applicable to latest release snapshot

According to Tristan (Lunarpages technical staffs), these updates are for security purposes to update each service to the newest, secure release. Generally there shouldn’t be any effects on Lunarpages users but in case you’re one of the unlucky one, reviewing the php.ini file(s) might helps.


Lunarpages Server Status (Jan 2009)

Just a quick updates on Lunarpages recent server performance – everything seems fine and I have another smooth month with the hosting company.

Server Status at Lunarpages


Lunarpages Speed Test

Lunarpages download speed test page

Not many web host are willing to open their server for download speed testing. Not many, but not Lunarpages. If you would like to check out the download speed for Lunarpages hosting, you can test it right here. The speed test was in fact created back in year 2005 and it’s widely tested by Lunarpages users.