Hosting error messages are specialised pages that appear when something goes awry for a website visitor.  The most common error is the 404, or in English, file cannot be found.  By default, when these errors occur with websites hosted by NamesAndSpace (N&S), the visitor will be taken to a simple error page with NamesAndSpace branding.

As of today (11th June), hosting error messages will now be handled through our support website, ACS Support.  For website owners, this change means that the number of steps required to contact our support team is reduced – with the new messages, you are already on our support website.  For website visitors, the context of the error messages remains unchanged.

Messages customised to your site

The majority of NamesAndSpace hosting packages included the  to specify custom error messages.  Hosting customers may be interested in creating messages that conform to their site’s design and/or to their own wording.   If you are interested in configuring custom error messages for your hosted website, please contact our support team who will be able to assist you further.

A side-effect of yesterday’s Internet Connectivity Issues was that our backup mail systems were subjected to a near 24 hour real world test, which they passed with flying colours.  All our Backup MXs performed exactly as intended without compromising the service availability for any of our mail customers even when running under loads of tens of thousands of messages.

What’s a Backup MX?

In the event of one of our primary mail servers going offline, all mail traffic is automatically transferred to one of our backup servers, called a Backup MX.  This switchover is seamless and is completely transparent to both the sender and the recipient.  The Backup MX will then store all incoming messages until such time that primary server is online again, at which point all messages are automatically sent to it.

All NamesAndSpace hosting accounts that include mail services automatically come with a Backup MX facility so that in the event of our the N&S mail server going offline, you don’t lose any messages.

Changes to Spam Filtering

At the peak of yesterday’s traffic,  our Backup MXs were storing in excess of 20,000 messages pending delivery.  Needless to say, the vast majority – more than 90% – of these were spam or junk mail.  In light of this, we are revising our spam filtering systems to purposefully intercept and eliminate a substantial proportion of spam messages before they reach individual e-mail accounts.

Our spam filtering systems work on a score-based.  Every message passing through our servers is subject to a series of checks, each of which is designed to test a particular aspect or property of the message for validity.  If a check fails, then the a value is added to the message’s spam score.  Once the score reaches a threshold value – the spam mark threshold – , the message is considered to be a spam or junk message.  If the score reaches a higher threshold value, then the message will automatically be deleted.

The changes we have implemented are two-fold.  Firstly, we have lowered the bar of the spam mark threshold.  This will have the effect of a higher proportion of messages being marked as being Spam.

The second change is more proactive.  One of the checks we employ is called a Blacklist Lookup where the address of the sending e-mail server for each message is checked against an online list of known spamming servers.  If the sender is a known spammer, then the message in question will now be automatically intercepted and deleted.

Since we implemented these changes last night, the amount of spam messages reaching individual mail boxes has reduced significantly.  These changes were not made solely in light of yesterday’s issues as we had been planning to introduce them in the near future.  If anything, yesterday merely served to accelerate their introduction.

False Positives

In the highly unlikely event you may believe that some valid messages are being marked as spam – otherwise known as a false positive – please contact our Support Team via http://www.acssupport.co.uk for further assistance.

As always, if you have queries regarding any product or service supported by ACS Limited, please do not hesitate to contact our Support Team via http://www.acssupport.co.uk.

Our monitoring software has raised an alert with regards to a potential problem with one of our mailservers this morning (21/09/09).  Due to the nature of the issue, our support team will be taking the mailserver offline for a period of around 30 minutes to instigate a fix.

We aim to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.  Further updates regarding this issue will be posted on this blog.

Update 10:30

Normal mail service has been restored as of 10:15 this morning.

Our support team will be performing routine maintenance on our N&S tonight between 1800 and 1900 (UK BST).  This is part of our normal maintenance program.  During this time, access to some services may be either impaired or unavailable.

To avoid any potential issues, we recommend to our hosting customers to avoid making any changes to your websites during this maintenance window.  Furthermore, access to our support website may be unavailable during this time.

f you have any questions or queries regarding this, or any other matter, please contact our Support Team.

Following routine maintenance and housekeeping tasks, we will be restarting our principal e-mail server, Thor, at around 1730 tonight.  We anticipate that Thor will be offline for about 5 minutes.  During this time, some of our POP users will experience problems in sending and receiving e-mail.

If you have any questions regarding this, or any other maintenance work, please contact our Support Team via our support website http://support.appliedconsultancy.com

Update 17:47

A little later than we intended, but Thor has now been successfully restarted and normal service has resumed.