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July 2024
Announcement: ALERT Re: Phishing and fraudulent email
To all clients: Please note that phishing emails are a
constant concern for security. Phishing emails are difficult to
prevent fully by email hosts, and overall the best way to protect
against them is to advise clients to exercise caution when reading and
reviewing emails to determine if they are legitimate.
One common email phishing scam that
circulates is one that advises that your email address/ mailbox may be
suspended if you do not click an enclosed link to "secure your email"
Another common email advises that your
mailbox password or access has been reset and you must click a link to
confirm this process or something along that wording.
In either case, our email system does not ever send out notifications
that require you to click a link at all. Our system does not use a
password reset that requires you to click a link.
The only notice that our system does
sometimes send out is an email that advises you when your mailbox is
near full, or becomes full. In this case, you will receive an
email if your mailbox space usage reaches 85% or 95% or when your
mailbox is full. This email simply warns of your mailbox being
near capacity or full and advises you to delete some emails to ensure
you have available space. There is never a link you need to click.
If you ever encounter a questionable
email, you are welcome to email it to our abuse email address for
review, or to our support email address. Our abuse department
investigates all submissions, however as this email address is used to
work with other networks and deal with abuse and security matters, they
do not issue replies for each submission as all communication is done
with other providers or networks for security purposes only.
Our support can be emailed at: support
[at ] parafx.com
Abuse can be emailed at: abuse [at] parafx.com
Thank you,
ParaFX.com NetOps Staff.
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January, 2019
Announcement: PENDING
Service Enhancement / Upgrade Announcement Coming Soon!
Stay Tuned.
To keep informed, please feel free to follow us on Twitter and also
watch our System News page for announcements from behind the scenes
Feel free to follow us on Twitter at:
@ParaFXcomHelps and @ParafxcomStatus
Any questions can be sent to
support@parafx.com
Thank you,
ParaFX.com NetOps Staff.
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August
06, 2017
Extensive Upgrades to Email Infrastructure and Free Upgrade For All
Client Mailboxes
We are pleased to announce the completion of a number of
infrastructure upgrades that have been performed during a recent
maintenance window for SMARTMAIL E-mail services.
Our staff have recently upgraded a number of back end infrastructure
aspects for email services. These upgrades have grown the
structure of our email services and ultimately resulted in a significant
increase in performance for many aspects of the email service.
Clients will now experience significant
performance improvements especially in circumstances where clients have
a large number of email items, and access using Webmail. The
upgrades that have been completed will also enhance back-end mail
processing performance and help to pave the way for future additional
enhancements.
In addition, the infrastructure upgrades have also allowed us to provide
a free upgrade for all mailboxes on the email system.
All mailboxes on our system have had their mailbox storage capacity
doubled, completely free of charge. This complimentary
upgrade is effective immediately for all existing and future clients,
and does not require any intervention to receive this upgrade.
Unlike many other service providers, it is important to us that upgrades
such as this be provided to existing clients free of charge. Far
too often providers reserve enhancements or promotions for new clients
only. Not our style!
The upgraded capacity on your mailbox will activate upon receiving the
first email after our scheduled maintenance which was completed on
August 06.
We wish to thank our clients for their continued business and support.
We look forward to continuing to pursue service enhancements such as
this.
To keep informed, please feel free to follow us on Twitter and also
watch our System News page for announcements from behind the scenes
Feel free to follow us on Twitter at:
@ParaFXcomHelps and @ParafxcomStatus
Any questions can be sent to
support@parafx.com
Thank you,
ParaFX.com NetOps Staff.
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February 18, 2017
Additional, More Secure Connection Options for Email Services (SSL / TLS
for IMAP, SMTP)
We are pleased to announce that we have done a roll out of
additional connection methods for our email services to provide more
secure options.Our email services
have provided various methods to connect to your mailbox and to receive
and send emails. These methods are:
POP (incoming)
IMAP (incoming)
SMTP (outgoing)
Webmail (Web Based Email client)
However we are happy to announce that the
system now provides additional security options for your connection
configuration. Specifically, the system now provides SSL
encryption and security as follows:
IMAP (regular non-encrypted) - Port 143
IMAP (With SSL Encryption) - Port 993
SMTP (regular non-encrypted) - Ports 25, 587
SMTP (with SSL Encryption) - Port 587 (SSL Optional) or Port 465 (SSL
Required)
Webmail: http://webmail.parafx.com
Webmail with SSL Encryption:
https://webmail.parafx.com
In the coming months, we will be revising our support documents to
provide updated information on recommended settings to be able to use
the enhanced connection methods. We will also be laying the smack
down on our spam fighting efforts and in that effort, we will work with
clients in a co-operative manner.
As part of the enhancements to email services and security, our support
group will be advising clients of possible recommended email settings
changes that will be required. The settings changes will be
relatively simple and their purpose is to ensure that clients are able
to take advantage of new security measures. In some cases with
clients who have been with us for many years, they may be using older
settings for their email which do not take advantage of improved
security. As such we will help everyone with the relatively easy
setting upgrade, when it is announced.
Below is a discussion of the various
methods of how you can connect to your email. These discuss what
these different connection methods are about.
Our mail services provide various methods
to connect to your mailbox and use your email. These methods
include:
WebMail - Our web based email
client available world wide, as a convenience tool when you are away
from your computer or if you do not have an email application or
software. Webmail is provided in both http and https versions.
The https version is known as the secure version, meaning simply that
logging in and communication from your computer to our mail system is
encrypted.
POP (formerly known as POP3) - This method is available from
virtually any email application or software. POP method involves
your email software connecting to your mailbox on the server and
downloading your email to your computer or device. Most often POP
downloads and removes the copy of each email from the server. POP
is a useful method as it allows you to download and keep your email on
your computer and can be configured to leave only most recent email
items on the server for viewing from other devices. Because of
this, it also helps to maintain your mailbox on the server from becoming
full with old email. When configured, it allows you to virtually
store unlimited amounts of email as it uses your computer to keep and
archive your older emails. The POP method is also sometimes
helpful if you have a limited internet connection because it only
connects to the server to send or check for new mail, but once it has
performed that task, it does not require a constant connection.
IMAP - This method is becoming the
more common method used. The IMAP method means that your email
application or software will connect to our system, and download email
details, however the emails themselves remain stored on our mail system
in your mailbox. Its like working live from your mailbox on the
server. Because IMAP generally does not remove items from the
server, email remains in your mailbox stored online so that you can then
see the same items from other devices as well. Most often portable
devices need to use this method as they have limited storage themselves.
So devices such as tablets and smartphones use the IMAP method to
connect to your mailbox on the server to view emails. As such if
you delete an email from your mailbox via your phone, and later you
connect with IMAP from your computer - the email will be gone.
This is great as it centralizes the storage of your email so it can be
viewed and managed from multiple devices which will all see the same
content.
A drawback to IMAP however is that because mail generally remains on the
server, its very easy to forget that eventually your mailbox on the
server will get full. Though it does take quite a while to hit
your mailbox storage limit, it does eventually happen when IMAP is used
because email is not usually downloaded and removed. If you wish
to retain old emails and avoid hitting your limit, it requires a bit of
discipline to either delete emails you don't need, or better yet, to
archive older items off the server in your email client software on your
computer or laptop. Most email software will have "Local Folders"
or "Storage Folders" which are folders that are contained in your email
software - and stored on your computer. The idea is that from time
to time, you should file away older items from your inbox or server
folders into these local folders. Some email programs
automatically archive older items for you this way to help.
SMTP - This is the method for sending email. Emails that
you compose and send are sent out using SMTP. The above methods
(POP and IMAP) are the ways in which you receive emails, while SMTP is
the name of the protocol that does the sending of emails for you.
To keep informed, please feel free to follow us on Twitter and also
watch our System News page for announcements from behind the scenes
Feel free to follow us on Twitter at:
@ParaFXcomHelps and @ParafxcomStatus
Any questions can be sent to
support@parafx.com
Thank you,
ParaFX.com NetOps Staff.
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Saturday
Feb 11, 2017 - 1:00am - 3:00am EST
Maintenance and Upgrade of Storage System - StudentPortfolios.ca -
Humber Student Web Services
ParaFX.com NetOps staff will be conducting some routine maintenance
tasks, and upgrade work on the storage system of our shared hosting
services provided to current and former students (grads) of WDIM
and MMDD programs at Humber College.
This will impact the serving of websites
that are hosted on the StudentPortfolios hosting system for short
intermittent periods.
Our NetOps staff will be performing some upgrades to the storage system
and as such, our staff will need to disable FTP access to websites to
ensure and protect data integrity.
In addition, websites may be unavailable
for periods between the above posted maintenance window. At such
time, we will be placing a notice up to inform of maintenance being
conducted.
This upgrade is necessary as it will
expand the storage system used by our web servers, and ensure that
greater levels of redundancy and performance can be achieved.
This maintenance / upgrade window has
been carefully scheduled so that the tasks required can be carried out
in a single maintenance window rather than imposing multiple windows of
interruption. It has also been scheduled to be performed during
off peak hours to minimize the impact to clients.
Once completed, all websites will resume
service and FTP access will be restored. The maintenance and
upgrade window is not expected to have websites unavailable for the
entire time of the maintenance window.
This service window will not impact email, database or domain services
as the maintenance is confined to only be on the storage system used by
StudentPortfolios.ca Websites and web space.
Clients hosted on our ParaFX.com shared hosting system will not be
affected.
We will continue to keep clients informed on the progress and completion
of the maintenance window on our System Status page and also on Twitter.
Feel free to follow us on Twitter at:
@ParaFXcomHelps and @ParafxcomStatus
Any questions can be sent to
support@parafx.com
We thank all of our clients for their patience and support as we perform
this upgrade and routine maintenance.
Thank you,
ParaFX.com NetOps Staff.
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Monday
Sept 05, 2016 - 12:01am - 6:00am EST
Maintenance and Upgrade to DB Services
ParaFX.com NetOps staff will be performing a series of upgrades to
our MySQL DB systems for all shared hosting services.
This upgrade is to improve performance and security as well as to ensure
future compatibility with various web applications.
The upgrade will affect all shared hosting sites that use MySQL DB
services. This is specifically an upgrade for our DB servers known
to clients as: mysql.parafx.com, mysql.smartwebservers.com,
mysql.studentportfolios.com. The upgrade impacts DB services used
by shared hosting sites / clients.
Initially our NetOps staff will be doing some preparation work and
upgrading the storage system / method for MySQL DB services. This
will take place throughout the weekend and is not expected to be service
impacting. DB services may require a brief restart during these
preparation steps and as such - this will take place after hours (after
midnight if needed).
During the above mentioned window, MySQL DB services are going to be
upgraded to a new version for MySQL. The upgrade will be to
version 5.5
Our NetOps staff do not expect there to be any compatibility issues with
the new version and client sites / applications, however it is important
that clients also maintain their applications as up to date to ensure
compatibility. Our NetOps and support staff are not able to
certify every client site / use of MySQL DB services due to the diverse
usage. Clients should make sure that their web content (whether
using a CMS system, web application or custom code) is compatible for
MySQL 5.0 or higher, and after this upgrade, the version will be 5.5
Our NetOps staff make every effort to not subject clients to frequent
changes in versions of platforms and technologies we use, in order to
ensure minimal disruption to clients, however at this time, this upgrade
is no longer able to be postponed and we wish to ensure that our
services are resilient and efficient.
Following the upgrades, clients can expect
to see a significant improvement in performance and efficiency in DB
services.
There will be no change to the method that your site (s) use to connect
to the DB services, so there will be no need to change any settings
within your site, however again, clients are recommended to use current
CMS systems and applications for their site(s) to ensure that there is
no compatibility issue.
There will be some brief interruptions to DB services during the above
maintenance window, however the interruptions are not expected to last
the entire window. DB services may be interrupted multiple times
between 12:01am - 6:00am EST.
We will continue to keep clients informed on the progress and completion
of the maintenance window on our System Status page and also on Twitter.
Any questions can be sent to
support@parafx.com
We thank all of our clients for their patience and support as we perform
this upgrade and routine maintenance.
Thank you,
ParaFX.com NetOps Staff.
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UPDATE - As of 10:00pm EST July 29, 2016 - ParaFX.com NetOps
staff are presently not conducting any customer impacting tasks or
maintenance. Unfortunately some tasks will be rescheduled due to a
conflict with some vendor / partner aspects. We are still
performing other aspects of maintenance and work within our IDC, however
none of our tasks are to impact customer facing services at this time.
Therefore the following maintenance window has been cancelled and will
be rescheduled at a later date:
Saturday July 30, 2016 - 12:01am - 4:00am EST - CANCELLED / NO CLIENT /
SERVICE IMPACT.
We are still waiting to determine if any
brief or momentary interruptions will be required for Sunday, however at
this time, we are likely going to reschedule any impacting maintenance
for another date.
Thank you,
ParaFX.com NetOps Staff
July 30-Aug 01 2016 - Tentative Maintenance
Saturday July 30, 2016 12:01am - 4:00am EST -
CANCELLED - TO BE RESCHEDULED
Sunday July 31, 2016 - 12:01am - 4:00am EST
Please be advised that over the course of the weekend, we are
tentatively scheduling various routine maintenance to our servers and
network equipment in our datacentre.
This window is presently tentative as we are awaiting some pending
equipment / confirmation from multiple vendors. It is our goal to
minimize the frequency of maintenance windows and their impact to our
clients - so we are working to consolidate routine maintenance with
upgrades. This window however may be rescheduled for a later date
if certain vendors cannot align with our schedule.
Most of our maintenance tasks will not be impacting to clients or
services, however there may be some tasks that will be performed that
may briefly disrupt services including web, email or DB services.
We are working to conduct a number of tasks throughout our datacentre to
prepare for future upgrades, changes and growth as well as increase
efficiency of services and operations.
Any service impacting tasks will be
performed during the following 2 after hour windows:
Saturday July 30, 2016 12:01am -
4:00am EST
Sunday July 31, 2016 - 12:01am - 4:00am EST
Any disruption to services is not
expected to last the entire window, and is more likely to be a momentary
interruption instead.
There are a number of tasks to be performed to continue to maintain
services. Some of these tasks are paving the way to upcoming
upgrades announced earlier in the year.
Generally speaking, there are no changes to versions or hosting
environment that require any changes to be made by clients. These
tasks are more of routine maintenance rather than upgrades, however we
are expecting some improvement of services as a result. Updates
will be provided on our System Status page to advise clients on the
status of maintenance.
However presently this maintenance is tentative and may be cancelled as
late as Friday July 29, 2016 8:00pm EST
We thank all of our clients for their
patience and support as we perform our routine maintenance.
Thank you,
ParaFX.com NetOps Staff.
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Feb
2016 - Upcoming Changes and Improvements
Please stand by as additional information on up coming system
changes and upgrades will be outlined on this page.
There are a number of projects and upgrades
that are in the works for various parts of our services. To be
frank, we often are very selective of upgrades and changes imposed on
our clients due to the potential such changes have for customer impact.
Our NetOps team walk a fine line in many cases to ensure that necessary
upgrades and alterations to service are performed to provide greater
security and stability, while also ensuring that upgrades that are not
necessary or beneficial are not pursued. We also operate several
series of servers for different aspects of our services. We
operate multiple shared hosting environments, along with dedicated
servers and virtual dedicated servers for our various clients.
Each have their special requirements, focus, and mandates.
In the coming months, there are a few
items on deck. Details are still being established, but we believe
in being transparent to our clients. At this point, we would like
to share some of the projects on deck. Note that some of these
projects are still in their infancy stage, and may change or be
superseded by other projects or day to day operations. Many of
these projects are in the interest of improved security or stability.
Upgrade PHP on Shared Web Services
We are reviewing options to upgrade the PHP version on our various
shared hosting servers. A specific version had not been determined
yet. Our shared hosting servers are comprised of clusters of many
servers all serving client websites. This means that your website
visitors may be served by one of many servers in a strategic load
balanced redundant fashion. We are looking to perform the upgrade
in order to increase security and efficiency. With upgraded
versions of PHP, there is often the creation of new capabilities and
enhancements to existing functions. However with that, there are
also certain functions that may become deprecated or completely
discontinued. We strive to select a version that ensures maximum
compatibility for our clients to the best of our ability. If your
website employs functions or methods that are being phased out- it
usually means there is a newer method to perform the said function.
The grandfathering of functions is determined by the PHP project itself.
Some functions that are becoming obsolete will still work, but a warning
may be generated - advising to upgrade code. Some functions that
are completely discontinued will produce an error and will not execute -
but most often these functions are quite old and not likely to be used
on most websites. Our goal is to select an appropriate upgrade
path to minimize any inconvenience while also ensuring beneficial
results.
Upgrade MySQL DB Services
Our team is also looking to upgrade many aspects of our DB services.
This will include the version of MySQL used, but also some changes and
upgrades will be done to the overall service. These changes are to
address greater security and performance, and above all stability.
We will be upgrading the MySQL version -
however the version has not been hard determined yet. Along with
this - there will be some structural changes employed to how the service
is used, and accessed.
Changing DB Access Methods
MySQL DB services are offered with a bulk of our hosting plans and
are intended to be used by your website or website application. It
provides DB services often required by CMS sites (Content Management
Systems) such as Wordpress. The MySQL service we offer is not
intended to be used for applications not hosted within our network
structure. Your website content has a direct method to communicate
with your database on our system and data transmission between site and
DB remains within our network (not transmitting to the outside
internet). However in the past, another method to manage your
database involved using of MySQL client software on your PC to connect
to your DB. This type of access is a somewhat outdated method and
does pose some possible issues. Therefore we will be altering the
service to no longer provide this method. For the most part this
should not affect client sites - but may change how you access your
database yourself to make changes. Another method will be
recommended and provided to accomplish this. This particular
change is going to be implemented in the very near future and likely
take place before other upgrades / changes.
These are a few of the items on deck
presently - that are possible to post on our website. More info
will be made available ongoing as many changes and upgrades are on the
horizon. Any questions can always be directed to our support
department as our support is provided by administrators of the system.
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Feb
11 2015 - Backend Improvements for Email Services - Targeting Higher
Security and Spam
ParaFX.com NetOps staff have been monitoring and working for some
time to make some improvements to our email services.
Our staff are very conscious of the
importance of email as well as the threats of spam and viruses and other
malicious activity that takes place over email. As such we have
been working very hard over a long period of time to make some
improvements to the back end processes for email, however changes have
been done in a very gentle mild way so as to ensure that no noticeable
imact is felt by our clients.
All changes that have been made so far
have not caused any negative impact to our clients, in fact they have
been virtually invisible as we appreciate how much our clients depend on
email services, and we do not wish to disrupt such services or implement
changes that have not been thoroughly tested and well planned.
Our work will continue and in the coming
months, we will be implementing other changes and improvements to
significantly imrpove the management of email and also target very
aggressively the problem of spam to our clients. In doing so, of
course precautions and planning will be a key factor, but in addition,
we will be announcing some changes to clients - in order to accommodate
improvements.
In some cases, we will be implementing
stronger methods of authentication for clients to access email services,
and improved settings options to allow more functionality and easier
use.
As we progress to make improvements and
changes, we will take every measure to accommodate clients and minimize
disruption. All changes will also be announced ahead via this
website and our twitter feed. We are also hoping to have client
co-operation with these improvements and changes in order to provide
enhancements. We will also be seeking client feedback to know
whether the enhancements have improved the levels of spam, and ease of
service use.
In the meantime, we do suggest that
clients also exercise some diligence with regards to email service and
security. Recently we have become aware of some cases where
malware infections on client computers caused some clients to have their
password information leaked out. Although we cannot prevent this
(as it took place on client PCs), we do remind clients to be mindful of
where they use passwords, and store them. Also we recommend that
clients maintain strong passwords for all services. Another
suggestion; clients often use passwords for multiple purposes (ie use
the same password for hosting, email, and for other outside services
like Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo etc). Doing so increases the risk of
login information being leaked. If another service you have is
compromised - and you use the same password info on your hosting
services, then ultimately your hosting service may be compromised as
well or abused.
We will continue to work diligently on
our email services and in doing so, we will also be implementing
additional rules on the system to govern against the spam related
activity, in order to provide customers a cleaner inbox.
Please watch this page for additional
info and we will be sure to keep everyone posted.
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 09 2012 - Upgrades to PHP on My Site Hosting Web Farm
ParaFX.com NetOps staff have performed a system wide upgrade to PHP
5.3.9 on our shared hosting platform.
This upgrade was performed to update the PHP
Engine as well as to implement more functionality as more CMS systems
are requiring PHP 5.3.x or higher.
In addition, the upgrade of PHP was also
to address potential security issues that can arise from running an
older version in a shared environment.
Unfortunately there may be some issues
with some websites that use older coding methods or functions that have
been discontinued. We will work to help clients as these issues
arise.
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 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