Just another year of practically perfect network uptime.  How many 9’s was it exactly?  I dunno.  However, this is starting to sound redundant.  Our 2010 and 2011 uptime was also somewhere around 99.9999%.

Speaking of uptime, in case you aren’t aware, our network is “fiber cut proof.”  What does that mean?  Two of our upstream connections are via large capacity fiber optic cables, while our third is via high capacity, high speed microwave radios (the exact same technology that high speed financial traders use).  So if our two fiber cables get cut we can push all of our traffic through our backup microwave connection, and your site and email don’t miss a beat.

From a recent Slashdot article:

More than 70,000 websites were compromised in a recent breach of InMotion. Thousands of websites were defaced and others had alterations made to give users a hard time accessing their accounts and fixing the damage. A similar attack hit JustHost back in June, and in a breach of Australian Web host DistributeIT just prior to that, hackers completely deleted more than 4,800 websites that the company was unable to recover. The incidents raise concern that hacker groups are bypassing single targets and hitting Web hosts directly, giving them access to tens of thousands of websites, rather than single targets. While the attacks have caused damage, they weren’t as malicious as they could have been. Rather than defacing and deleting, hackers could have quietly planted malware in the sites or stolen customer data. Web hosting companies could be one of the largest holes in non-government cybersecurity, since malicious hackers can gain access through openings left by the Web host, regardless of the security of a given site.

We’ve already closed these holes.   Are you really still hosting your sites with the volume-based hosters!

~ Oban

There is nothing more tricky and fraught with potential problems than DNS upgrades.

This week we migrated from BIND to PowerDNS.  Prior to the migration we dutifully tested PowerDNS on different servers, in different configurations, consulted other sysadmins who were running PowerDNS, and found all tests to be working flawlessly.

So we went ahead and upgraded all three of our DNS servers from BIND to PowerDNS, and watched…

Continue reading PowerDNS migration creates bug ripples →

From the warm confines of our Support FAQ, I present to you a video called: “How one sets up their Android phone to send and receive email on the Brownrice servers.”  Descriptive and catchy title, eh?