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Nov 12 2011 - Upgrades to MySQL Database Services
ParaFX.com Network Operations staff have implemented a recent
hardware upgrade to our database servers.
No change has been made to software
versions at this time, however our core database servers have been
upgraded to provide double the processing power and memory to continue
to support clients websites and media.
This upgrade did require a small
interruption of approximately 6 minutes of database service in order to
ensure the safety and integrity of the databases and their data.
We wish to thank each and every one of
our clients for their continued support and business as we continue to
implement new operations and services. This would not be possible
without our clients.
Through the coming months, we will
complete, but also continue to implement operations to benefit clients
as well as target for minimizing our environmental impact. As
always we strive to grow and improve.
Any additional details will continue to be posted on this page.
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Nov 2011 - Updates and Changes to SPAM filtering Systems
ParaFX.com Network Operations staff have implemented some strategic
changes to our back end spam filtering strategies.
Our mail admins have always taken an
aggressive approach to managing and controlling incoming SPAM to the
system but still maintaining a delicate balance to ensure that no
legitimate emails are filtered.
Through using updated filtering systems
and a more in-tune system to evaluate message, we have managed to reduce
the amount of incoming spam by an average of about 37%.
This does not mean that all spam will be
stopped, as it is an ever evolving battle, but through use of more
sophisticated scoring system, a significant reduction of spam can be
achieved without posing a risk to filtering legitimate emails.
These changes and upgrades have increased
the processing power required to manage mail. We employ using a
"farm" of several servers in our datacenter all processing mail
functions, so in turn, upgrades have also been performed to all mail
systems to ensure there will be no performance impact to clients.
Network staff are always investigating
the system to implement improvements to our production environment to
ensure higher quality service for clients. These changes were performed
seamlessly and in a way to not impact clients.
This upgrade was done proactively as well
to allow for greater capacity. Many hosting providers will hold
off such upgrades to oversubscribe the system as a cost saving measure.
We wish to thank each and every one of
our clients for their continued support and business as we continue to
implement new operations and services. This would not be possible
without our clients.
Through the coming months, we will
complete, but also continue to implement operations to benefit clients
as well as target for minimizing our environmental impact. As
always we strive to grow and improve.
Any additional details will continue to be posted on this page.
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July 01 2011 - Upgrade to Humber Hosting / Studentportfolios Hosting
RAID Storage System
ParaFX.com Network Operations staff have installed some new
networking hardware into the RAID storage system that houses core
website data for our Humber Hosting / Student Portfolios System.
This upgrade will provide larger throughput
with operations between the web servers and the storage system.
In addition we have also added additional
servers to our cluster of web servers for the Humber Studentportfolios
service. ParaFX.com has always operated a "cluster" or "farm" of
several servers in a load balanced / redundant fashion. When web
requests come in - our load balancing cluster equipment delegates the
task to one of the servers in the "farm" By adding additional
servers, the "farm" can handle much larger volumes of web requests and
FTP connections. All of our core services use this method.
This also allows us to remove servers from service to perform updates,
tests and maintenance.
Overall the Humber Student Portfolios
hosting system has increased capacity, and equipped to handle more web
services than ever before.
This upgrade was done proactively as well
to allow for greater capacity. Many hosting providers will hold
off such upgrades to oversubscribe the system as a cost saving measure.
We wish to thank each and every one of
our clients for their continued support and business as we continue to
implement new operations and services. This would not be possible
without our clients.
Through the coming months, we will
complete, but also continue to implement operations to benefit clients
as well as target for minimizing our environmental impact. As
always we strive to grow and improve.
Any additional details will continue to be posted on this page.
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Apr 17 2011 - Core Network Upgrades
Over the course of the past several months, ParaFX.com Network
Operations staff and owners have been working diligently to implement
many core operation improvements to further grow the infrastructure and
efficiency of the Operations.Our
primary goals have been to re-design operations to improve the service
as well as re-engineer the datacentre physically to implement more
energy efficient solutions.
In recent weeks, ParaFX.com has
implemented several new environmental control systems which, as
discussed in our Green News page, allow the datacentre to utilize the
outside weather for temperature control when possible. This allows
us to reduce our load on the power grid and minimize environmental
impact significantly while also maintaining a proper environment for
server / system operations. In addition several renovations have
taken place to improve the facility itself and prevent waste of
resources.
In addition several core network upgrades
have been implemented which include upgrades and additional internet
peers. This allows for more internet connectivity and better
routing with local and worldwide ISPs.
ParaFX.com Operations have also
implemented many hardware upgrades which not only will increase
performance significantly but also introduce more redundancy and
failover options to ensure greater stability and growth potential.
On this point, ParaFX.com staff are continuing to do such upgrades and
replacement of hardware in day to day operations. Some hardware
and systems can be replaced without customer impact so that is being
done on a constant basis over the next few months.
These are a few of the many changes that
we are implementing on the core operations. Over the next few
months, many back end changes will be taking place to increase
efficiency and reliability - while being virtually seamless to our
clients.
Once these undertakings have been
completed, we expect to be launching some new hosting options and
services in the near future and as we have done in our over 10 years of
operation, we expect to be providing free upgrades and service
enhancements to our existing clients as a thank you for your continued
patronage.
For those clients who have been with us
for many years, they are already aware that from time to time, we expand
quantities and services to existing clients as well as new clients.
It is the practice of many service providers to offer new options to new
clients only, while we strive to provide benefits to all our clients as
much as possible.
We wish to thank each and every one of
our clients for their continued support and business as we continue to
implement new operations and services. This would not be possible
without our clients.
Through the coming months, we will
complete, but also continue to implement operations to benefit clients
as well as target for minimizing our environmental impact. As
always we strive to grow and improve.
Any additional details will continue to be posted on this page.
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Apr 19 2010 - More Green Operations
ParaFX.com is continuing efforts to enhance our operations with
specific target to maintaining quality of service while enhancing our
operations to tend to environmental concerns.
As such ParaFX.com will be implementing
several "green" incentives in our operations both within the data
centre and the office / monitoring facilities. During our annual
network maintenance window which is to be announced, several initiatives
will be implemented to lessen our environmental impact. In the
past many efforts have already been made, but there is always room for
improvement.
Details of these changes and upgrades will be announced in the near
future.
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Mar 31 2010 - Core Upstream Upgrades
ParaFX.com have recently performed a major overhaul on the portion
of the infrastructure which handles our upstream providers and peers, as
well as our border network security and routing.
Network Operations staff over a 4 day
operation have replaced hardware of our border routers. In doing
such as well as with working with our upstream providers - we have
implemented a new system which provides more sophisticated routing and
redundancy as well as additional protection and safeguard provisions for
attempted attacks.
Through this intensive upgrade -
customers will see greater speed, enhanced reliability and also
additional prevention of internet attacks.
This upgrade paves the way for better
performance overall for our upstream providers and also is a crucial
step for further core upgrades that are to be launched throughout the
year.
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April 06 2009 - PHPInfo Posted
As part of a security mechanism on our system, users are not able to
run the phpinfo command from their script.
This is done to prevent confidential system information from being
disclosed. However the phpinfo function is helpful to programmers
who need to know key information about the system.
We have posted an edited copy of the PHPInfo which contains the system
information that users may require. To view the information visit
http://web.smartwebservers.com/phpinfo.html
Students who are hosted with Humber College (or graduates), are hosted
on a different system, however many of the php configuration is the
same. Students can view the PHPInfo for their system by visiting
http://web.studentportfolios.ca/phpinfo.html This system is
applicable if you have a Student Portfolios Linux Plan.
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March 31 2009 - SPAM Filtering Increased
ParaFX.com provides
a system wide spam filtering mechanism. At present we operate a
very light filtering of spam which catches a large amount of spam,
preventing it from entering your mailbox. The reason for using a
very light threshold is to prevent any legitimate messages from falling
into the category of SPAM.
The threshold level has been
in place for about 5 years now, and after 5 years of collecting
data and assessing the results, we have decided to lower the threshold -
which means that more spam will be filtered than before.
It was important to observe over a long period before making this change
so that, like when we first implemented SPAM filtering, we can be sure
that legitimate email is not being filtered.
So as of 4:00pm today, the threshold for SPAM (the scoring of spam) has
been adjusted to filter more. This is not expected to impact your
ability to receive legitimate mail, however you may see a phenomenal
difference with the amount of spam you receive.
This action was performed
based on your feedback and also years of data accumulation. We
hope that this will be a significant positive impact for you, such that
you have less spam to delete or deal with. We hope that this will
increase your productivity and save you time and effort. We expect
that some customers will see a more noticeable difference than others.
Some customers businesses, and site will lend itself to receiving more
spam than others - so those customers may see an immediate improvement.
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April 2009 - Hardware Replacement and Updates to be Implemented
In the coming
month, ParaFX.com is continuing to target replacing a number of servers
to provide larger scale hardware. Most of the servers (or farms of
servers) are used for back end processing, or behind the scenes services
that allow your web and email service to operate.
We thought it best to keep you informed of some of the servers which are
destined to be replaced in the upcoming weeks:
1. Our public facing DNS
server farm - These are the servers your domain resides on. They
are in charge for resolving your domain name and all pointers which make
up your service.
2. Outbound Mail
servers - These are the servers that are used by your website (not your
regular email service) to send out emails. An example is if you have a
contact form on your site, these servers mail the results out for you.
3. Internal and
external monitoring systems - ParaFX.com operates an independently owned
datacentre. In addition we also employ a remote site known as "The
Remote Monitoring Centre or (RMC)". The remote monitoring centre
is completely detached from our datacentre, however it employs internet
links from popular providers in order to provide us with a way to test
the services from a customer perspective and from several different ISP
perspectives. As such there are many servers performing tests,
from many different providers in the datacentre, and also in the RMC.
These servers will be replaced and system administrators will also be
making adjustments and exploring new monitoring techniques for more
enhanced tracking.
All the above discussed upgrades will be scheduled and planned
thoroughly. In all cases above, there will be virtually no
customer or service impact resulting. Since all the above servers
are redundant (ie there is more than one of each), the servers can be
replaced and upgraded seamlessly, simply by performing the replacement
one by one.
Also, the above upgrades may shift in priority based on urgency and
other tasks at hand. In some cases, the above upgrades may provide
a logical path to upgrade some area of service not listed above.
These are just some of the
upgrades we are proposing to perform with datacentre hardware in the
coming month. This will pave the way to larger scale service, and
greater datacentre efficiency and operation.
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March 30 2009 - ParaFX.com Upgrades MySQL Services to Version 5.
ParaFX.com has
upgrades our MySQL service from version 4.1.22 to version 5.0.24.
This new version provides faster performance, as well as adds many
features to the most popularly used database in the industry.
This upgrade was performed, based on customer demand. It is
important to note that many hosting companies who have existed for more
than 3 years, often provide MySQL version 4, and provide an "upgrade
option" for clients to move to version 5. Most often this upgrade
is also an increase in cost. At ParaFX.com we strive to provide
upgrades to existing and new clients at no additional charge whenever
possible. |
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March 30 2009 - ParaFX.com upgrades MySQL Hardware
ParaFX.com has recently replaced our MySQL servers with larger more
redundant hardware. This ties in with our upgrade of the version
of MySQL.
This new hardware, though invisible to the end user, will provide higher
scale performance and flexibility to our users. Customers will
notice an improvement of their websites where MySQL is used, especially
for those customers with complex heavy database driven sites. |
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March 25 2009 - ParaFX.com Replaces and
Upgrades All Customer Mail Servers
ParaFX.com operates what we
call a Mail Farm. The Mail farm is comprised of many servers all
performing mail requests and tasks for customers. We then employ
load balancing equipment which distributes requests among the several
servers available. This provides customers with redundancy and
performance.
Recently
we have replaced all of our mail servers which are used by customers for
mail tasks such as webmail, sending, receiving and antivirus protection.
Customers may see a performance increase. At present no changes
have been made to how our system operates with mail, but all hardware
has been replaced.
In the
coming months, ParaFX.com will be working on further upgrades which will
be announced. These upgrades may provide some new additional
features, while some of the upgrades will be back end process upgrades
to increase efficiency. |
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Fall 2008 - ParaFX.com Upgrades All
Mailboxes to provide 1 GB (1000 MB) of Storage
ParaFX.com
mail administrators have upgrades all customer mailboxes to provide 1
gigabyte of storage (1000 megabytes) from the previous 250 MB storage
allowance.
This upgrade is effective for all mailboxes on the system regardless of
what package you subscribe to and is effective immediately. This
upgrade is provided at no additional cost as with most upgrades we
implement. |
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Fall 2008 - ParaFX.com Upgrades all MySQL
Databases to 250 MB
ParaFX.com has implemented an
upgrade to all MySQL databases to provide 250 MB of storage from the
previous 25 MB. This is applicable to all customers who subscribe
to a hosting package that includes a MySQL database.
However there is an issue with the web hosting management interface,
whereby some customers may still see 25 MB storage limit in the SMARTSQL
section. This is a cosmetic issue only that we are working to
resolve, however your space usage is accurate and your allowed space is
250 MB regardless of what is indicated in the management interface.
This upgrade has been provided free of
charge to all customers who have a MySQL database. |
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Fall 2008 - ParaFX.com Replaces all Linux
(My Site Hosting) Web Servers
ParaFX.com operates what we call a Web Farm. The Web Farm is
comprised of many servers all serving your website requests and tasks.
We then employ load balancing equipment which distributes requests among
the several servers available. This provides customers with
redundancy and performance.
Recently we have replaced all
of our Linux Web Servers which are used by your websites' for serving to
your site visitors. These servers serve your web content, and also
provide you the FTP and FrontPage access to your website files.
Customers may see a performance increase. At present no changes
have been made to how our system operates the web services, but all
hardware has been replaced.
In the
coming months, ParaFX.com will be working on further upgrades which will
be announced. These upgrades may provide some new additional
features, while some of the upgrades will be back end process upgrades
to increase efficiency. |
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This system news page was launched in April
2009. Previous upgrades and system changes were announced to
customers but details are not available on this page at this time.
System upgrades have been a constant invisible process that our owners
and Network Operations staff have engaged in from our conception in
November 2000. We continue to work to provide free upgrades to
existing clients as much as possible.
Unlike other hosts, we do not believe in "grandfathering" customers, or
providing incentives and upgrades to only new customers. We
believe in providing increasing value to our customers, new and
existing, year after year.
We thank all our customers for
their continued business and support! |
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System News