Metrics

Uptime

2008 was our best year every for server up-time. Overall we averaged 99.994% up-time. Here is a breakdown by server:

• Epsilon – 99.994% (1 outage, 30 minutes)
• Mars – 99.994 (1 outage, 32 minutes)
• Mail31 – 99.989 (2 outages, 29 minutes)
• Minbar – 99.994 (3 outages, 27 minutes)
• Web32 – 99.988 (1 outage, 31 minutes)
• Web43 – 100.00
• Whitestar – 99.999 (1 outage, 1 minute)
• Vorlon – 99.995 (2 outages, 27 minutes)

Spam Filtering

During 2008 Doreo Hosting processed 31.56 million emails. Of those emails only 2.57 million (or 8.1%) were delivered to customer mailboxes. We find it simply amazing that over 90% of incoming email is spam.

Awards and Honors

During 2008 Doreo Hosting was awarded three times for our services. In February Doreo won for “Best for Budget” hosting. In October 2008 Doreo won for “Best for Reseller”. In December Doreo won for “Best for Shared Web Hosting”. You can vote for Doreo Web hosting at Web Host Directory. The Doreo Hosting website design was also featured on the book “Web Designers Idea Book”.

Server Upgrades

April, May and June were really busy for us. We migrated all our Ensim and cPanel customers to brand new Dell hardware running cPanel. We had a few minor hiccups along the way but overall the migration went very smoothly. We’ve very happy that all shared and reseller customers are now running on either dual dual-core or dual quad-core servers with at least 4 GB of memory. The new hardware has improved our uptime as well as overally site load times. The combination of cPanel and LiteSpeed web server has proved to be extremely reliable and fast.

cPanel upgrades

It’s a bit hard to believe but we actually performed two major cPanel upgrades this year. In late June we upgraded all systems to cPanel 11.23.x. The major (noticeable) feature with this release was the addition of Roundcube web mail. In late December we upgraded to cPanel 11.24.x. Most of the changes in this release were “behind the scenes” changes related to the performance of WHM and cPanel.

Doreo Hosting Blog

Last but not least were upgrades to the Doreo Hosting blog. The first change was simply cosmetic (switching to the Thesis theme). We also got a lot more active posting on the blog. Besides the normal monthly up-time and MailFoundry statistics we began to publish various articles related to managing your web site. We will continue to update the blog in 2009 and hope to make it an even more valuable resource.

Quite a number of the changes are related to the back-end administration of the server. A number of the features, however, directly impact the way cPanel works, performance and memory utilization. Here is a brief summary of the new features:

cPanel Backup

You can now create a file called cpbackup-exclude.conf in your home directory (/home/user-id) to exclude files from a cPanel backup. Each item to skip must be on it’s only line in the file. Directories should not have a trailing slash. Each entry must have the full path to the file or directory. This file is only used if you manually run a complete site back up from cPanel. It does not affect the Doreo backup system.

Dovecot

Dovecot is a replacement for the current POP and IMAP service (Courier) used by cPanel. Dovecot offers improved performance and reduced server resource utilization. Both Dovecot and Courier will be supported by Panel (but only one can be used). At the current time we do not plan to convert to Dovecot. We are in the process of benchmarking the two options and will be make an announcement at a later date if we will convert.

Error Page Editor

The Apache error page editor has been updated.

Email Disk Usage

The trash folder is no longer included in the email disk usage calculation. This will affect how email disk quotas are calculated but it does not affect the over account disk usage calculation.

Web Log Processing

The web log process has been improved to speed up processing and reduce server resource utilization. These features should allow the web statistics process to complete earlier in the day.