SPAM is quickly becoming the #1 scourge of the Internet, as you’re probably aware. Yes, the endless garbage threatens to gobble up an ever-increasing amount of our days, at a seemingly relentless pace. Regardless of the effectiveness of SpamAssassin, ClamAV & similar facilities, which are actually more than adequate for the majority of users yet today, FastServers is excited to announce the provisioning of a new technology geared towards removing SPAM while avoiding direct strain on webservers/mailservers themselves. It’s a mean, razor-toothed fish that eats anything & everything it can get its hands (gills?) on. You might have heard of it as it’s certainly gaining momentum throughout our industry: the Barracuda Spam Firewall!

Obviously quite appropriately named, theseBarracuda systems are a standalone, proprietary fusion of OS & hardware that exist for the sole purpose of acting as an external gateway to destroy spam/virii/spoofing/phishing/spyware transactions, before they’reallowed to hit your destination mailserver. Essentially, you take a domain heavily inundated by SPAM and point its mail exchanger (MX) record towards one of our Barracuda systems at the hosting facility in question, and from that point forward all SMTP transactions destined for your domain must be cleared for final delivery by the Barracuda… offending nastiness is dumped into oblivion. The best part is, the pruning & dumping processes don’t strain your webserver/mailserver–all of those extra, grueling processes can be deactivated on the domains in question as the Barracuda takes over these responsibilities, leaving your server much happier and more productive. Yes, webservers have feelings too, you best be respecting that. Hahahaha.

At FastServers, our Barracuda service is keying on a number of critical factors as far as SPAM detection & removal is concerned: SpamHaus’ RBL/XBL services (*very* well respected throughout the hosting community), Daily SPAM definition updates and *HOURLY* virii refreshes, built-in controls for obvious-to-somewhat-sneaky spoofing & denial of service protection, and a Bayesian “artificial intelligence” learning system that constantly grows a database full of auto-rejected messages based on the Barracuda’s unique experience on previous filtering jobs.

Will the Barracuda devour legitimate mail? Very, very rarely. Our experience with this particular issue alongside a certain large solution of ours that houses over five thousand mailboxes has brought about a maximum of a dozen random issues out of the entire community, and these have almost entirely been based on webserver-generated form-to-email transactions. Upon ordering Barracuda service for a domain or group of domains, we’ll encourage you to give us a chunk of domains, or originating hosts, or precise addresses to “whitelist”, if necessary, to avoid any chaos going forward. We’re looking to eliminate headaches here instead of adding to them, trust me.

Would you like to know more?

http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/spam_overview.php

This is most definitely a welcome service development here at FastServers, and though there will be some fine-tuning and periodic adjustments required for particular situations, we encourage you to consider this service for your most heavily-assaulted-by-sewage domains. You will be pleasantly surprised (and more than likely shocked) at the effectiveness of the Barracuda. Start winning back control of your everyday online existence today! It’s well worth it.

When FastServers opened its new Chicago office on June 1st, one of our main goals was to locate quality staff members who would be able to let us continue our extraordinary growth rate and continue not only to keep pace with, but to improve our existing customer service. I’m happy to introduce our first of many upcoming Chicagoland based hires - Sandra Litz. Sandra moved to Chicago’s Lakeview area from Rochester, NY, two years ago. An extensive background in administrative duties, retail, and billing/accounts made her an ideal fit for this job, and we’re sure our entire client base will be delighted to work with her.

As a vital member of our Billing Department, Sandra will be handling accounts receivable, billing activities, and customer service activities. Sandra has fit well into the mold of FastServers.Net with her high-energy attitude and ability to retain mass amounts of policy and procedure based information. She has already taken an active roll in answering phones, tickets, and processing orders with perfection!

During non-working hours, the previous film major loves watching movies, especially comic-style kung-fu types. Aside from a love of tattoos—which she considers a beautiful art form—she also has a passion for underground indy music. Sandra can be greeted via sandra@fastservers.net

In upcoming months you will once again experience the evolution of FastServers.Net in many different areas. On a daily basis, we strive to achieve and set new industry standards, evaluate new product offerings, and help everyone—including your organization—to achieve true greatness. From customer feedback to competitive analysis, our team spends some time each month discussing how we can do it better, what services our customers are asking for, and how we can take the existing services we have to a new level. Upcoming newsletters will reveal exciting new changes, but I want to take a few minutes to discuss the ones right around the corner.

Anti Spam and Virus Defense System - We have for years utilized a software-based solution built into our control panel offerings with a combination of RBL Black listing and SpamAssassin as the primary choice. This has proven to be both server-intensive, and less than satisfactory in fighting the war on SPAM. We had an opportunity to implement a hardware-based solution for one of our valued clients this quarter, and the results were simply amazing! With their valued feedback, we turned this into a full-blown service offering that is now available for $5.00/month per domain. As our CTO, Travis Schaffner, has discussed, this new technology will allow you to take control of your email once and for all. For more information on this service visit :

http://www.fastservers.net/management-services/anti-spam-virus-protection.html

Pentagon.Fastservers.Net 2.0 - Some major upgrades are currently being worked on by our programmers and design team for an interface redesign. This interface redesign’s primary goal is to provide easier single click access for opening tickets, server information, and billing information. The completion date of this project should be mid-August, with testing by select customers taking place in July.

Mail Notifications Lists - Based on customer feedback, our support engineers have setup 2 new mailing lists so you can receive up-to-the-minute emails about any planned outages or important information about service at FastServers.Net. We recommend all clients join these lists which are directly available athttps://pentagon.fastservers.net

–> Announcement Lists.

While it is true that we are a growing company, it is still a direct goal that we remain consistent and in touch with our customer base. Your feedback is a vital part of shaping the direction of this company. We always welcome comments, ideas, suggestions, and critiques about the FastServers.Net operations. All three of the above services were escalated and brought to reality based on this type of feedback. Communicating your ideas can happen by mentioning an idea during a ticket, emailing admin@fastservers.net, or directly emailing anyone in the company. We do keep and talk about almost every idea or piece of feedback that is received. Stay warm, be cool, and as always thanks for taking time out of your busy lives to read the FastServers.Net newsletter!