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.

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

Webmail been upgraded with six new features.

1. Users accessing webmail for the very first time will be prompted for the name and email address that should appear in the From: field of outgoing email messages.

2. Users may now compose HTML emails within webmail.

3. Webmail will now display full HTML emails, and optionally make this the default view.

4. Winmail.dat attachments generated by Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express can now be viewed within webmail.

5. Spell checking has been upgraded and is now more accurate and more intuitive.

6. The login screen now provides space for a full email address in the login field.

The rebrandability of the webmail interface is unaffected by today’s upgrade.

If you have questions or comments about Ilisys webmail, contact Technical Support (support@ilisys.com.au or 1800 995 645)

If you identify a fault with the Ilisys service or network, you may contact Ilisys Platform staff at any time during the day or night.

Call our Faults and Emergency service on 1800 795 645. The operator will take details of your domain and fault and pass these to an on-call member of our Platform team. Any Ilisys fault will be escalated and addressed as a priority.

There is no charge for reporting a fault in the service that Ilisys provides. A $60 call-out fee will apply if the issue involves user error, a fault with the configuration of an email address, database or website, or a failure outside of the Ilisys network.

Ilisys Technical Support is available to help you with these latter issues at no charge during our extended opening hours.

In the event that a fault or emergency affects any aspect of the Ilisys service, a notice will be posted to the Ilisys System Status page, at http://status.ilisys.com.au.

Updates will be posted to this site regularly and it will represent the most effective way to track developing situations.

For the most timely updates, you may like to subscribe to an RSS feed of the Ilisys System Status page - available at feed://status.ilisys.com.au/nfblog/feed.

The information in this post is replicated on the Ilisys website at http://ilisys.com.au/explore/ilisys/reporting-faults.

Please contact Technical Support (support@ilisys.com.au or 1800 995 645) if you have any questions about these reporting and monitoring processes.

Please be advised that Ilisys has altered the way that email addresses and email accounts are managed.

BENEFITS
A. You may now configure unlimited accounts. The only threshold that will apply is your data storage allocation.
B. Changes you make to your email configuration will be provisioned instantly.
C. You may login to your email using an actual email address.

SUMMARY
The short version is that you need do nothing, until such time as you need to make changes to the configuration of an email account. Changing your email password would be an example of such a change.

At that time, you (or your email user) will be notified that they have five days in which to update their login details in your email program.

DETAILED EXPLANATION
These changes stem from a need to speed up the fulfilment of changes that users make to the configuration of their mailboxes.

Password and aliasing changes will now be actioned instantly, as will the provisioning of new mail accounts.

Email users will also be able to login to their mailboxes using an actual email address, rather than an arbitrary username assigned by the system.
These changes will also allow email users to create unlimited email accounts.

A necessary part of this new service offering is a gradual migration from our current format (cust1 for example) to one in which your customers will be able to sign into their email accounts using their email addresses.

Your new email users will be able to access POP/IMAP and webmail with this new style of username immediately. However existing user accounts will only work until that particular account is next modified.

These existing mail account holders will be required to migrate their usernames to the new format within five days of modifying an account. After five days, the old username will become inactive.

We acknowledge that the person modifying an email account may not necessarily be the account user, and so an explanatory email will automatically be sent to the email account in the event that their email username will change.

This automated email will advise the account user of their new login details and explain that they have five days in which to make the necessary changes. At the bottom of this message you will find a sample of the explanatory email that our systems will send to your clients on your behalf.

SAMPLE NOTIFICATION MESSAGE
To: john.smith@your-domain.com.au
From: do-not-reply@your-domain.com.au
Subject: New login details for this email account (custo1)

As a result of an email system upgrade, you must update the login details that you use in your email program.

At some point in the next five days, please change your email client username from custo1 to john.smith@your-domain.com.au.

In five days time, your old username (custo1) will become inactive.

New username - john.smith@your-domain.com.au
Same password - xsDlJ23y7

Regards,
Ilisys Web Hosting