xF Host Update

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Mike Edge said:
Or returning? Wonder why Sheldon's site is down? We put all the xFS bs behind us and he returned as a client.
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So his site went down after he returned back to XFHost? That would make perfect sense, though i would not publicize that to your other customers.
 
DRE said:
What other hosts do you know of do this in the off topic forum of xenforo? Potential customers looking for new hosts don't need to see this.
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Look in third party services, it was moved from there. Anyway, as stated. I have things to do and as others have said, it's not really of your concern, so please stop derailing this thread. Keeping it cleared to updates is important to our clients and they don't need to keep receiving notices due to your replies that have nothing to do with our updating.
 
tajhay said:
He is posting in an off topic section.

Its something he, as a business owner should have realised. If his server went down, how would he communicate. There should have been a mirror, a backup hell even a blog where he could keep everyone updated.
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I understand that. But I'm not discussing his actions, I'm just saying that constructive criticism or helpful suggestions can be made and then moved on. Here it seems, that there's a sort of repetition and redundancy. You've said your comments and grievances, now we're all just staring at a bunch of posts that are convoluted at best.

I'm here to check the status of xFhost. I just don't see the need for commentary past that.

DRE said:
I haven't brought any opinion other than where site down time announcements should be posted. Your obviously not reading 'like an adult'.
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It's clear from your comments your opinion of the situation.


I don't mind if you have different opinions than I on a situation, just I don't see the need for derailment or repeating yourselves as it doesn't seem to be changing anything.
 
Mike Edge said:
Look in third party services, it was moved from there.
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As been previously mentioned over and over again, Third party services NOR off topic are the correct mediums for you to do your customer support. Is it really that hard for you to do your support on another server(which would be more reliable than XFHost anyway?)
 
tajhay said:
As been previously mentioned over and over again, Third party services NOR off topic are the correct mediums for you to do your customer support. Is it really that hard for you to do your support on another server(which would be more reliable than XFHost anyway?)
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Can you continue this after he fixes everything ?
 
We're 6 hours behind France correct? So their abuse team should open in an hour and be able to look at the tickets and resolve our issues... am I missing anything?
 
denisx04 said:
We're 6 hours behind France correct? So their abuse team should open in an hour and be able to look at the tickets and resolve our issues... am I missing anything?
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Hopefully, he said normally France and Canada not get involved in the other data center locations but he will try to get them to, he is also unsure if abuse works on the weekend in France.
 
Can Canada abuse even do anything? I'm assuming it was France who shut us down so I figured they're the only ones who can turn us back on. As for moving, you'll still have to wait until OVH turn us back on so you can transfer everything correct?
 
FWIW, here is what I think might have happened.

Hotmail and others allow e-mail customers to flag incoming mail as spam. If the number of flagged messages exceeds a certain threshold within a time period, they get active - normally by blacklisting your outgoing SMTP IP. Of course a user might have all kinds of reasons to (wrongly) flag your mail as spam. I noticed lately that spammers do that quite a lot - they start immediately with the verification and welcome e-mail and so on. But also members who might not be active any longer in a community and are too lazy or just don't know better how to unsubscribe keep hitting the spam button to get rid of what they consider unwanted mail.

Now, I haven't heard of Hotmail actually contacting a host. In my case, about a year ago, Hotmail blacklisted our SMTP IP. We then added a rule to our MTA (postfix) to send out all e-mails to Hotmail (and their affiliates like live.com etc.) via Amazon SES until we'd have solved the matter with Hotmail. Support staff from Hotmail was surprisingly helpful. Their first response email contained the message below, which might also contain some useful bits for you.

To cut the story short, we joined their JMR Partner Program, which helped us to quickly respond to users who "abuse" the spam button by either automatically unsubscribing them from all of their subscriptions or even by banning them.

While I cannot guarantee email deliverability from your IP, I can offer you some advice that may help your situation.

. Monitor user complaints. Windows Live Hotmail also has a sender complaint feedback loop program called the Junk Email Reporting Program (JMRP). Enrollment in this free program will benefit you as a sender as it will keep your email lists updated and populated with interested Windows Live Hotmail customers. This program will help you to remove those Windows Live Hotmail customers who do not want to receive emails from your company. If you are interested in joining this program, please visit https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsjmrpp&ct=eformts

. Please visit http://www.senderbase.org, or http://www.kloth.net/services/dnsbl.php to verify that your IP is not being targeted by any third party block lists.

. Segment your mailing infrastructure by IP. Marketing email, transactional corporate email, "forward to a friend" email and signup emails should be sent from different IPs. This will help to identify what types of messages are being flagged by Windows Live Hotmail customers.

. Strengthen the sign up process. Confirm that you are using a double-opt-in sign up process. This will not help in removing existing Windows Live Hotmail customers from your email lists but it will confirm the authenticity of those who sign-up for your email campaigns and newsletters.

. If you have any feedback loops setup with other ISPs, you should look for trends to try and determine possible causes - a new data source? New advertisement? Maybe folks signing up do not recognize the mail?

. Clearly mark your emails so that Windows Live Hotmail customers are able to identify quickly and easily that they requested emails from your service.

. Do some analysis on the data regarding complaints - look at Windows Live Hotmail customers who have never clicked, opened, responded or bounced in any way. These poor performers could contain many bad addresses.

. Clean up your lists. Remove those who do not want to receive the emails. Make the unsubscribe process more visible.

. Enroll in the Sender Score program. This is the only white List that Windows Live Hotmail uses. It is owned and operated by Return Path. You can find information about this program at http://www.senderscorecertified.com

In addition to these recommendations, we offer these programs that will help to improve the reputation of your sending IP addresses:

. Windows Live Hotmail has created the Smart Network Data Services program. This is a service that helps legitimate email senders work with their customers and partners to reduce spam originating from their IP. To register, please go to http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/ This program allows a sender to monitor the 'health' of their IPs.

While using the SNDS tool, enrollment in the JMRP or having your IPs registered with Sender ID will not allow emails from your mail servers to bypass our filters, these are in place to help legitimate companies deliver their emails to Windows Live Hotmail customers.

. Apply for the Sender Score Certified Mail program:

If you are doing all the above and you continue to have deliverability issues, you may wish to consider joining the Sender Score Certified Mail Program, a third party program administered by Return Path, Inc. Many legitimate mailers and marketers have qualified and joined this program to improve mail deliverability and decrease email from being filtered to the Junk E-mail Folder. Sender Score (www.senderscorecertified.com) is the only service to which we subscribe

The troubleshooting steps in this email are recommendations only. Microsoft makes no guarantees that following these steps will guarantee deliverability to MSN, Windows Live Hotmail, or Live.com customers.

For more detailed information about best sending practices to Windows Live Hotmail users, please review the following white paper: http://download.microsoft.com/downl...a6-497d-9693-78f80be272fb/enhance_deliver.pdf

Sincerely,

Ryan
Windows Live Hotmail Sender Support
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Mike Edge said:
Yeah :( But he knows Canada abuse comes in tomorrow at 8am.
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If for some reason you prefer Canadian hosting, I can recommend iWeb. We have a couple of servers with them. Their abuse policy is very pro-customer, meaning, in my experience they don't just pull the plug but instead contact you if they receive an abuse notice. Support is OK - if you know what you're doing and if your required support is limited to replacing faulty hardware, you should have no problem with them. I have seen negative reviews of iWeb where people complained about lack of support (which I cannot confirm) and language issues (which can be a problem if the support guy is not a native English speaker).
 
denisx04 said:
Can Canada abuse even do anything? I'm assuming it was France who shut us down so I figured they're the only ones who can turn us back on. As for moving, you'll still have to wait until OVH turn us back on so you can transfer everything correct?
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Yes, it is Canada that has to do it, our servers are in Montreal. As for moving, nope. If the servers are not back online, I will be able to move us via hourly backup restoring. I am just working on now getting all the funds needed to purchase the servers which will be online tomorrow morning and will add SSDs on tuesday as they are special ordered, so until Tuesday, server will be using SATA3 for MySQL which is still ok, as SATA3 is 15k rpm, just like SAS.
 
I haven't been a customer of Mike and xFHost since day one but pretty close. Yes there have been some ups and some downs just like with any other host. No hosting provider is 100% perfect and if they claim to be they are lying. While I don't have a "big" site at the moment or heck even a decent size forum for that matter I could save considerable money by switching to another host. Here are the reasons why I don't.

  • Support (Mike knows xF like the back of his hand and I have dealt with Mike before he started xFHost)
  • Support (Yeah I know I said it twice but no other host goes out of his way to make sure their customers are happy and kept informed)
While maybe the xF company forums may not be the best place to handle this situation I commend Mike for having the balls to get on here and face the ridicule he is getting from some people on here to keep his customers informed. Like I said I could easily run my site off a $2.00 host for now but I stay because I trust that Mike will do what is best for his business and his customers. If you don't have a dog in the race then just stay out of it. He is doing this so we his customers know what is going on. Most people as has been stated don't want anything to do with Facebook or Twitter. I knew about the xF Facebook page but didn't know anything about the Twitter which it seems is what Mike is using more for the updates. So just leave him alone and non customers (that includes ex customers) get off his back and let him get this situation resolved. I know that Mike will do everything to make it up to his loyal clients that didn't jump ship because of a few growing pains and a few server hiccups in the beginning.
 
AlexT said:
FWIW, here is what I think might have happened.
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No, as I spoke with a tech tonight who was finally honest. This was not just us. They did a sweep of an entire server bay, cycling off all servers using high e-mail or bandwidth. They did this though shortly before going home for the shift and leaving it for abuse to go though on a case by case basis. They are claiming this is the first phase of getting rid of their spammer friendly reputation. Even with it said our servers will be turned back on tomorrow as I proved in my logs it was not spam, just high volume forums, we are still moving.
 
Mike Edge said:
No, as I spoke with a tech tonight who was finally honest. This was not just us. They did a sweep of an entire server bay, cycling off all servers using high e-mail or bandwidth. They did this though shortly before going home for the shift and leaving it for abuse to go though on a case by case basis. They are claiming this is the first phase of getting rid of their spammer friendly reputation..
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Ouch. This may get rid of their spammers, but certainly not only of them. :censored:
 
Working out final financial details to purchase the servers (as June's OVH invoice was just paid recently) but we will be leaving OVH. Servers will now be 100% on nlayer bandwidth. This will be a major upgrade for our clients :)
 
Very nice job Mike. Glad to hear some good news over a rough day. I also have to tip my hat to you by the way you handled things, you have been on longer than I have and I have no clue what time it is where you live, 3 am here. Just shows us how dedicated you are to your clients.
 
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