Over the last month, the majority of Power Cluster websites have been gradually migrated to a new hosting cluster. This new hosting cluster includes many improvements to your website performance, security and development simplicity:

* Performance is boosted by bigger and faster Dell hardware.
* Security is enhanced through additional firewall and network measures.
* A single Apache webserver layer for development simplicity. No mod_rewrite voodoo required!

Please contact support@ilisys.com.au if you have any further questions.

We have increased DNS redundancy for the de-branded domain used by Ilisys resellers for toolkit, mail and ftp access.

This domain now uses six separate DNS servers, spread over two unique and remote providers.

This new configuration limits the opportunity for degraded service in the rare event that a provider’s network is inaccessible.

Ilisys today announced that it is the first web hosting company in Australia to achieve carbon neutrality.

Ilisys hosts websites and email for over 18,000 Australian businesses, groups, and individuals which uses more than 200,000 KWh of electricity each year. However, because Ilisys uses 100% renewable solar and wind energy to power its headquarters and data centre it prevents the equivalent of over 140,000 KG of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere. Ilisys further reduced its carbon footprint to zero by planting trees to offset the greenhouse gas emissions it generates through other business activities such as staff commuting and travel.

Australia is the highest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases amongst developed nations (greenpower.gov.au) and Matt Mulligan, Director of Product Development at Ilisys, says the entire business community, as well as individuals, can take action now to reduce Australia’s growing greenhouse debt and minimise our impact on the environment.

“People may not realise that hosting a website contributes to greenhouse gas emissions,” said Mulligan. “However now that we are Australia’s first carbon neutral web host, people have the option of reducing greenhouse gas emissions just by choosing us as their hosting provider.”

“While the environmental impact of a single computer isn’t earth-shattering, our infrastructure supports the websites and email of over 18,000 Australian individuals, groups and businesses, and this is significant,” Mulligan continued. “Since Ilisys owns and manages its own network infrastructure and data centre we have been able to choose an environmentally responsible way of operating it while maintaining the quality and reliability of service that our customers expect.”

About Ilisys
Ilisys is Australia’s first carbon neutral web hosting company. Since 2000 Ilisys has provided more than 20,000 business customers and hosting resellers with high quality, reliable, web and email hosting.

Ilisys is different to other web hosts because it owns and develops its own software, servers and fully redundant internal network infrastructure which enables it to offer hourly backups, load-balanced servers and an SLA (Service Level Agreement).

In addition, Ilisys provides online payment systems, powerful ecommerce and web analytics applications domain name registration and management, digital marketing services, and website security.

For more information please visit ilisys.com.au and ilisys.com.au/green.

We built our first web server cluster because we realized that standalone servers can’t be counted on to reliably host business websites. When the Standard Cluster was launched in 2004, it was certainly the most dependable shared platform in Australia.

As time has passed, the system has continued to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations. In fact, the Standard Cluster itself has a flawless uptime record since April, 2004.

In this same period, we’ve learned a great deal by observing the tremendous volume of data served by the Standard Cluster. Some months ago we realized that with a clean slate, we could build a more powerful cluster that would be more than just reliable. It would serve pages faster than any cluster online.

Three specific advances now contribute to the Power Cluster’s increased performance:

1. Static pages are served instantly and no longer queued behind dynamic PHP or Perl pages;
2. PHP and Perl pages are processed more efficiently by a dedicated server instance on each cluster node;
and
3. All outbound http traffic is compressed on the fly, increasing raw download speeds.

As well as improving performance, the Power Cluster gave us the opportunity to improve our PHP session handling. Thanks to a new and proprietary management system, sessions on the Power Cluster will no longer be dropped in the rare event of a failure in a cluster node.

Finally, the Power Cluster is configured with PHP 5, while the Standard Cluster will continue to use PHP 4 in the medium term.

Further reading:
About the Power cluster

Over the years, we’ve had a lot of positive feedback for maintaining a proprietary control panel in lieu of a restrictive third-party system like cPanel or Plesk.

We also receive a good number of Toolkit feature requests each month, many of which prove difficult to add to our original interface.

Our new Toolkit provides a solid framework for new features, as well as delivering a range of performance and usability improvements.

We invite you to use the new system and to let us know if you have any comments or questions.

If you’d like to show the new Toolkit to those of your clients who are not yet Ilisys customers, direct them to our fully functional demo Toolkit..

Links:
Toolkit2 live site
Toolkit2 fully functional demo

Recently, Ilisys has upgraded it’s DNS nameserver infrastructure to provide better redundancy and latency for DNS queries.

Our new primary nameserver (dns1.ilisys.com.au) is located in Santa Clara, California.

Our new secondardy nameserver (dns2.ilisys.com.au) is located in our own data-centre.

Our new stealth nameserver (dns0.ilisys.com.au) pushes updates to our primary and secondary nameservers.

This new structure provides international redundancy for DNS lookups as well as better latency for overseas clients.

All customer domains that are managed by us have now been redelegated to these new nameservers.

Resellers with whitelabel nameservers should contact Ilisys Technical Support.

Customers who manage their own domains may wish to redelegate their domains to our upgraded nameservers. Easier still, these customers may wish to transfer their domains to our management.

In either case, they should contact Technical Support (support@ilisys.com.au or 1800 995 645).

To support the continued development of the hosting clusters, we are making changes to the directory structure of sites hosted on the Linux clusters.

The new directory structure, detailed here, will be in place for all new hosting packages on a Linux cluster, and will be rolled out to all existing packages as each package is either renewed or upgraded.

Ilisys scooped up the prize for the best E-Commerce site at the 2006 WA Web Awards, announced at a gala presentation dinner at the Parmelia Hilton last Friday.

Freckle Creative, Itomic, Sumo, Key2design and Cube7 also took home trophies, with the best student site award going to Central TAFE graduate Ryan Briggs. The evening was an outstanding success, and highlights the maturing of the web industry in Western Australia.

“The night exceeded our expectations, we have a lot to live up to next year” said Myles Eftos, chairperson of the WA Web Awards. “Competition was tough and it is great to see the local industry pushing the envelope”.

A full list of winning sites is online at wawebawards.com.au/awards/2006.

A new address book import/export feature has been added to Ilisys webmail. This allows you to easily import a CSV file (can be created from most email clients) of your address book into your webmail account. It also allows you to export your webmail address book to a CSV file.

This feature can be found at the bottom of the “Addresses” page.

There have been a couple reports of forums that are running on Invision Power Board being hacked and used to push adware onto visitors’ systems.

Click here for the SANS diary entry