bstrouss

As a satisfied TCH customer of over 10 years, but admittedly a casual webmaster (especially lately) I find I am rusty when it comes to managing my sites and determining if they are relatively safe and secure. I also have some questions that I think are probably answered in the forums or in the help system, but I can't always find them by searching, and find I spend a fair amount of time just trying to figure out where I should look. I find the forums to contain a lot of old information that I am unsure of its applicability today, and the Help System to have some good content but not necessarily in a concise "here's what you need to know" perspective. A suggestion would be to clean it up a little and consolidate the information into a single support system (no small task, I assume), and provide a "New? Here's what you need to know" post that covers some of the basics for a new (or rusty) webmaster. Maybe that exists, but I'm not seeing it. I hate wasting resources by creating tickets when the information exists, and hate waiting even a little while for a response to a ticket when I know it's a common question that has been answered somewhere. I wonder if I am doing all of the right things, and if new users to TCH are doing the right things to prevent them from having (or opening) a path to my sites and email. We all get a lot of SPAM, but in the past I've had email sent to some of my rarely used forwarding email addresses all at the same time, which I believe would only happen if the server was hacked (or someone hacked and did a tedious search through my reseller account) since I never send mail to or from those. (I set them up for certain opt-in mailing lists so I know where email is coming from). I've also been reading older posts about the potential technical inability to get true isolation from other users on shared servers using PHP and MySQL. I view web hosting a little like automotive self-servicing on a highly computerized car --- it's important to know what you know and what you don't, otherwise you can create a lot of damage. I'm a little concerned about the damage I might cause with an old script or version of some open source software, as well as a little concerned about the damage my sites might suffer due to others' knowledge of shared server holes (or lack thereof). And allow me to share one of my pet peeves. It's the messages of little value that the friendly staff members sometimes post. While perhaps a nice touch to welcome the new user or to provide a quick answer, these messages remain there for years and require all future users to scroll through them to figure out if there is an appropriate explanation. It discourages customer self-service when a customer spends time reading these, and pretty soon everybody just uses the ticket system and knowledge gets lost. I suspect that is happening, given the age of so many of the posts. Some answers are great and I want to say THANKS, but that would just waste others' time. I've been a member for ten years and show up as "new to the forum" presumably because I'm not an active user. Please don't welcome me again (and again and again)! Thanks for listening / reading! I hope these are useful suggestions.

I realize this topic is very old, but wondered if anything in Apache and/or MySQL or PHP had changed to plug this security hole on shared servers. Thanks!

Some questions, probably best addressed here (feel free to edit, etc.). As a reseller, I have some clients who have emails forwarded to AOL accounts. Unless someone has some other solution, I will have to set up full email accounts for each of them, and they'll have to check mail in both places. Does AOL allow POP3 access, or is it limited to only their own "download email" capability? I'm thinking they could get mail from both places via Outlook or any other email client. Does AOL happen to allow automated forwarding FROM their system? (I assume not) One of my customers gets mail forwarded to Yahoo, where it ends up in his bulk mail or junk mail folder. I've had other situations where mail doesn't go through to MSN (so I'm told), as well as to at least one standard corporate email address (my wife's). Not to make this a bigger problem, but isn't this a bigger problem than just AOL? Not too bad if everyone uses the same databases of SPAMmers, but a big problem for hosting companies with thousands of hosted domains, sending email to lots of major email providers like MSN, Yahoo, Google, Earthlink, etc. Is there any reporting capability available for us to monitor email usage? I don't want to see my clients' mail, I just want to see if someone is sending bulk emails from their TCH mail server s. I can talk with them to determine if it is SPAM or legit. I'm more concerned about hackers pirating their account (or one of mine) and blasting SPAM from there. Does TCH have "governors" or limits on outbound email to trigger an alert when exceeded? Lastly, I've gotten "Undeliverable Mail" messages from AOL on occasion, even though I never sent the email, nor did it originate from TCH servers nor my ISP. My email address was listed as the "from" address on email sent from somebody else. I assume this person got a virus and that virus randomly chose my address from their address book to disguise the SPAM. Is it possible to detect that someone on TCH servers has one of these SPAM viruses through some automated tool? Thanks in advance, Brett

I was searching for something lately and learned of Fantastico Deluxe (netenberg.com), a script loading add-on for CPanel. It has some nice capabilities, and as I have discovered, some of these open source add-ons can be cumbersome to install. Any possibility of use getting this as part of the Totalchoice offering? It looks like it costs $90 for the first server, and less for each additional. I'd be willing to pay a one-time "access" fee for it, or perhaps an additional small amount per month for it (say, up to $1.00). A quick question --- how do some of these hosting providers afford to host "unlimited" storage and bandwidth services, with PHP, MySQL, Fantastico, etc. for $10 per YEAR? I'd think you'd be losing money just monitoring the automated installation! Keep up the great work! Brett

At another hosting service I saw stats that showed hot links to image files on our site. I can't find anything similar from AwStats. We just finished a big trade show, and around the same time Medical Pocket PC added a news blurb that loads an image of our product from our image file. I don't care too much about the bandwidth they're using, but I want to get a feel for how many times our info is seen on their site, and how many people link to us because of it. I need this because I want to determine how many people from the trade show are finding us through our efforts there versus through the Medical Pocket PC site. I assume that hot links don't affect the visitor numbers, right? Is there an easy way to see the hot link stats? Thanks!!! Brett Strouss OTOVATION - Innovative Audiometry

No animals were injured in the production of this spoof... Brett

I have been looking for some rich internet application tools (and developers) for an application idea I have, and found software from Laszlo Systems that I think is pretty cool and appropriate for my application. Kind of an alternative to Flash remoting, I think. Here's a link to a demo that illustrates this type of functionality. I haven't truly tried the product, and I know there are a few other companies that have similar "rich" application tools, but Laszlo seems to have a less proprietary solution than the others I've seen. Laszlo Systems Dashboard Demo You may still be able to download the whole thing to try it out. Does anyone have any experience with Laszlo? If you like this, also look at the cool user interface from: The Brain Thanks for the great hosting and valuable community input! Brett bstrouss at luxara dot com (pardon my site's construction!)