Hello to everyone out there in No Man’s Land. I’m in the middle of a brutal war, one that you may have engaged battles with in the past: the war on spam. But today, the enemy has pulled out a secret weapon that is completely decimating me, and could pose a very serious threat.

No, I’m not writing this way to be funny, I’m very serious about what’s going on. It has to do with one of the websites that I maintain, the one for the 17th District PTA. Because its webhost gave up the ghost about two months ago, I’m currently hosting it under the same hosting package as the one for Webmacster87.info, but today it’s apparently been scapegoated into a pretty difficult situation. Here’s a copy of the dispatch that I sent to my webhost just a few minutes ago:

To whom it may concern:

I’m writing concerning a rather serious issue which has come up today concerning one of my domain names. The main domain name for my site is webmacster87.info, however this one is concerning 17thdistrictpta.org which was added on.

Today I have been receiving an abnormally large amount of spam coming to my personal e-mail (webmacster87@gmail.com)–about 1800 in the last twelve hours alone, and still counting. However, all of these were actually “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)” messages that, when I examined them, showed that it appears that some spammer has been sending out spam e-mails with From e-mail addresses that have @17thdistrictpta.org suffixes. Because many of these spam e-mails were sent to invalid addresses, they bounced back, and since the fake From addresses (like “ahplatne_1979@17thdistrictpta.org” and other random things like that) don’t exist, all of those bounce-back things have been sent to my own personal e-mail, since it is the “catch-all” address.

I am concerned that some spammer or group of spammers somewhere is using our domain name fraudulently as a scapegoat from which to send out spam messages, and I am concerned that this could have grave ramifications for the name of the organization that it represents, such as it being blacklisted by e-mail services, or possibly being reported to you or someone else as though I was responsible for those spam messages. I’m also quite concerned about the impact that the amount of bounce-back messages is having on my bandwidth and your servers.

I don’t know if you have the ability to do anything about this issue, but since you are my web host and your servers are the ones being affected by the tremendous amount of bounced-back messages, you would be the best ones to report this issue to. I would appreciate any advice and assistance you could possibly offer on how to deal with this issue so that I am not affected by further ramifications (and can possibly stop the deluge of bounce-backs).

Thanks for any help you can offer.
–Douglas Bell
Webmaster, California 17th District PTA
http://www.17thdistrictpta.org

As you can see, this is very serious, and I’m very scared about what the possible blow-back from this could be, so I could REALLY use any help you could offer. Have you ever had an issue like this? Do you have any ideas of how I can stop this? Please sound off any advice you may have in the comments!!!

Update: Here’s an example of what I’m dealing with, as you can see in Gmail’s spam box, and an example bounced-back e-mail. But it’s not the fact that I’m getting these bounced-back e-mails that I’m worried about, I’m worried about blacklists and people seeing the domain name on these spam e-mails and thinking bad things…

Tags: 17th District PTA, Delivery Status Notification, e-mail, spam, urgent, web host

I recently realized that despite the popular demand from my visitors, I’ve never taken the opportunity to blog about my brand spanking new web host. Well, now I’m going to take the opportunity.

You’ll recall that during the month of December, both Webmacster87.info and phpBB Weekly suffered significant downtime, none of which was my fault. After a series of communication feuds, I found out why. My old webhost, Kazix, had merged with this Fat Network group of people, and so the excellent support that I had remembered having with Kazix was reduced to a very poor support desk “maintained” by Fat Network. My cPanel username/password kept changing under their watch, and they moved to new DNS nameservers without warning me (causing me to lose a handful of posts on here), and they were continuously having downtime. But worse, when I reported to them these problems, they would respond as though I had obviously done something to cause the problem. At the end, I got fed up and gave them a reply that I am not a total idiot and that I know what I’m doing here, thus I should know why these errors are coming up, and furthermore giving it to them about their horrible service and brutal customer support. Their reply was a pretty “we’ll look into the problem” response.

So, even though my hosting with them is supposed to continue into April, I got fed up with having to deal with these people and the continuous stress that I had to deal with in December of trying to keep my websites up somewhat. In particular, I was having to deal with a flurry of outcries from the relentless community of phpBB Weekly listeners. I’ve essentially declared my investment in hosting from Kazix to be a case where I was completely suckered.

However, I did have an alternative option. Back in June or July, Caitlyn Imburgo had pointed me out to Web Hosting Buzz, a link which I had remembered, although, looking at the packages they offer, it seemed like a “too good to be true” offer. However, at the end of December, with Kazix flailing out from under me, I went ahead and purchased their cheapest Silver plan.

For $59.40/year (=$4.95/month), this is one awesome plan. They have no setup fees, and the plan comes with 375 GB (that’s right, gigabyptes) of disk space, along with a whopping 2.5 TB (2500 GB) of bandwidth. Just to put that into perspective, right now, I’m only using about 64 MB of disk space (about 0.017% of my total allotment), and have used 4.54 gigabytes of bandwidth (which, although that’s a lot for most other webhosts, again is only 0.178% of my available total).

It gets better, because this plan has everything. If I had chosen to (I didn’t at the time), this plan would have come with one free .com, .net, or .org domain name, and the domain name would be mine (for free) for life as long as I was still a Web Hosting Buzz customer. But even then, the plan allows not only unlimited subdomains, but also unlimited parked and addon domains as well. (Back when I had Kazix, I had to shell out an extra $15/year for each addon domain I wanted!) They also have all of the major support for e-mail, PHP, MySQL, FTP, multimedia support, and a whole bunch of other fun stuff. They run their servers on dual quad-core Xeons with 8 GB of RAM and standard RAID hard drives to protect against data loss. They even support all the fancy stuff like Zend Optimizer, GD, ImageMagick, SSL, and all that jazz.

But the part that I was happiest to see (particularly after my recent debacle) was all the support functionality they offered. As opposed to the phantom e-mail only support of my old host, Web Hosting Buzz not only offers 24/7 e-mail AND online help desk ticket support (they claim that they’re there 24/7 but I haven’t had a reason to find out yet), but they also provide a customer support phone number (9 AM-5 PM M-F), an online wiki for support, and even their own community support forums! (Although nothing is entirely perfect; they use vBulletin.) With all of these support options available, I’m feeling much more secure about being on this webhost. Plus, after my first four weeks of using them, service has been reliable, fast, and perfect, so I haven’t even needed to try their support services yet!

In addition, they guarantee 99.95% uptime, and they even have a section of their website which tracks the uptime of their servers. Their setup was very fast, and I was ready to go with their hosting within a few hours. However, the best part has to be their Price Freeze guarantee, something which I have not seen from any other webhost: they guarantee that they will never raise prices for existing customers. The price you pay when you first sign up, even if you sign up with a discounted coupon code, will be the price you’ll pay to renew for the life of your hosting. Talk about awesome.

Anyway, so far, I’m really satisfied with my new web host. Not only have they been super-reliable, but at an unbeatable price, they’ve opened up so much more stretching room which will make it possible for me to easily expand my online presence should I choose to. If you’re interested, be sure to check them out.

Tags: bandwidth, disk space, features, hosting, Kazix, new, web host, Web Hosting Buzz, website