Astaro Security Linux provides firewalling, VPNs, spam, virus, and surf protection in an all-in-one network security gateway. Its features include stateful packet inspection, deep packet filtering, application-level intrusion detection, content filtering, virus detection for email traffic (SMTP and POP3) and Web traffic (HTTP), whitelists and blacklists, IPSec and PPTP VPN tunneling, spam blocking, logging, and reporting.

The software is built on an embedded, especially hardened Linux distribution. The WebAdmin tool and Up2Date service make it easy to install, manage and update all six security applications. This version includes virus protection for HTTP, intrusion protection, L2PT VPN-support, ISP-uplink failover, spam protection for SMTP and POP3, SMP support, and stateful failover functionality in high availability installations.

Many small improvements were also made. This release improves speed, downloads, and stability of the HTTP Proxy and the QoS packet classification. It includes fixes for accounting not working properly, traffic on VLAN interfaces not being reported, SMTP messages, the spam header showing up in the email body, pattern Up2date not possible even with a valid license, IPS license being improperly checked, the POP3 proxy blocking all messages, the SNMP daemon consuming too much CPU, the authentication page possibly being blank, and PPTP assigning the same IP address to multiple clients.

PHPX is a Web portal system, blog, Content Management System (CMS), forum, and more. It is designed to allow everyone to be able to have feature-rich, interactive websites even if you do not know a bit of programming. Some key features include fully-integrated forums, downloads, an image gallery with slideshow and auto-thumbnailing, support ticket system, a GUI interface for Web page content management, news with topics and instances, and a whole lot more.

It allows you to fully customize the look of your site. A feature to change default menu when theme changes was added. The way that the updater uses current version was modified. A minor bug in the user module was fixed. Several bugfixes, more Xcode added, the news module is expanded to include comments, a FAQ module is added including comments, polls with comments are added, and more. The Image Gallery Module, custom homepages, Google Search, and a new comment system were introduced. A major security fix and over 50 other changes were made.

Minor bugfixes and major features, including shoutout, guestbook, improved news templating, and a lot of other miscellaneous changes. Minor bugfixes including expanding the forum look, cleaning up SQL queries, and MySQL 5.x compliance. Changes were made in the installation process to clean up the problems with versions 3.5.12 and 3.5.13. Bugs in the contact form image verification logic were fixed and the ability to delete a system page was removed.

OK, let’s say I have a domain, example.com (no, that’s not my domain…I’m using it as an example!). I get an internet connection at home, via DSL or cable, from an ISP that has a good spam policy and stays out of blacklists. I set up email so that mail to whate…@example.com goes to one of the POP boxes my ISP provides. I use my ISP’s SMTP server for outgoing mail. Since my ISP has a good spam policy, all is well.

Now, suppose I decide that the web space or services that come with my DSL is not good enough (to small, no database access, etc), and I don’t want to have www.example.com point to my home machine, because my home machine is not reliable enough (no UPS, flakey power in winter, etc). So, the obvious solution is to find a hosting company, and stick www.example.com there. Email for the domain stays with my ISP and my home machine. Just the web stuff goes to the hosting company.

Question: suppose I pick a hosting company, and they turn out to not be as careful as one would like when it comes to keeping out spammers, and end up getting blacklisted. What effect does that have on web sites hosted there? It is possible to use SPEWS or other IP based blacklists in firewall configurations – ie. deny all traffic from that IP, or to just drop connections to web server ports, but I don’t know of anyone who is actually doing this.

If someone is selling services that appear to be significantly more than the competition, then one should ask “what do I get extra for the cost”? If he truly wants filet mignon quality and is willing to pay, that would be on the level of “Yes sir. How high do you want me to jump?” I just said his prices were reasonable if he is offering well above *mediocre* service. If someone wants “A #1, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap” service, that will cost extra.

If it weren’t for the binaries I have at the same host as my main website, 2 MB would be more than enough. The truth is if I literally wanted to save a few bucks a month, I could move those binaries to my free ISP webspace. My “problem” is that less than 2 MB of text files now gets so many hits, I have to worry about bandwidth. 2 MB of text files can add up if on some days 100+ unique users want them. With a site with small storage space and tons of hits, then worry about bandwidth. The more affording hosting that’s available, the better! You and far too many others are obsessed with price as being the most important feature in a web hosting provider.

This approach is ludicrous if you value your web site AT ALL. Find a few customers who appreciate your customer service, your procedures, hardware, backups, bandwidth connections etc, and price *IS* irrelevant. I’ve developed ecommerce sites with fully-functional complete self-serve administration panels. And some of my clients would rather pay me my premium rate to have me type their text in. Not everyone wants cheap. A lot of people–an increasing number, as people realize the implications of “cheap”–are willing to pay to have things done right, with assurance, with accountability, with support.

Anyone know of decent NT web hosts that support ASP, Access, SQL Server? In Canada or not, just looking for a reliable host at a decent price. Local would be nice but not critical. I see – as someone who is affiliated with a company that supplies linux based servers/hosting/lans, you may have a slight conflict of interest in bashing his request. Schooner, I suggest you (and anyone else out there) try to avoid getting your hosting (or IT supplies) from companies that have newsgroup trolls.

Have you tried local places like TwistedPair? I hear they may have NT hosting soon. Besides, windows servers do bite. Average uptime for windows? Hours to days. Average uptime for a unix or linux box? Weeks to months. Unless you really need a windows server for something, and there are reasons for them, then don’t use windows. Twisted Pair is a good company. Some smart people there. Yes there is a reason I need a Windows server and your uptime numbers are way off the mark so please keep this thread on track. I didn’t ask for a comparison of servers, just where I could get an NT/W2K based web server host.

Registering a domain name in the uk can be quite cheap nowadays, but can anyone suggest someone who does web hosting as well at a reasonable price? Most of the ones I come across are over £200+£80 for Nominet fee. I looked at Cyberstrider but the pricing seems to be a bit confusing. The pricing structure is being reviewed and if you look at the price list now you will see it has been simplified. Basically, for web hosting you choose: 1) Domain Name and DNS services 2 Web Hosting And then just pay for your choices.Very sensible, web hosting is expensive in small volumes, especially when you consider the asymmetry of the traffic – you’re paying for two-way traffic, but it’s mostly only going one way.

An ISP can load the link better through more services. I suspect this balancing might be why I was offered free dialup with my co-located box. The dialup is more or less free for the ISP to provide, after they’ve bought an Ascend or whatever. I did wonder about writing a totally automated web hosting solution though. I reckoned I could offer ftp only web hosting, with php and mysql, and possibly perl, if I could sandbox the cgi-bin effectively, – and have the provisioning of the account totally automated. But you’ve still to be there to answer the phone. Make it email, and if they want to talk they can do so by appointment, phoning you at premium. That’s the price they pay for cheaper hosting but of (hopefully) high quality.

Support costs money, and many web design services are quite competent enough I think to be able to wait say a maximum of 24/48 hours for an answer. But if you tie yourself to a phone, you’re fu^H^H knackered I know from experience in selling software “on”-line. It’s one of the reasons for specialising in the first place – it’s the dial-up service that really requires the expensive support phone lines. Web-hosting just needs good connections!