Update: 7/1/2010 12:06 PM
Rackspace has contacted us in clarification that it was coincidental that the hurricane was happening at the same time of the network-related issues they were experiencing and that the support representative who informed us of the issue was incorrect in stating it was hurricane-related.

Update: 7/1/2010 12:25 PM (response from Rackspace)
We do not take incidents like this lightly and realize the impact this has on our customers.  It is important to note that this incident being mentioned below has not resulted in any customer’s email being lost.  The incident has caused connectivity issues for some of our customers, causing them to be unable to connect to their mailboxes.

The part of our system that sends and receives email is not affected and any incoming email to our customers is being delivered to customer’s mailboxes.  We actually do provide our customers with two different MX records that point to different systems, so that in case one fails the backup will pick up any incoming mail.

Having a 3rd party backup MX service can offer an additional layer of protection for your mailboxes, but for this incident in question the backup MX service would not have provided any additional protection.

Original Article:

Rackspace, the company often thought to never be offline, has been hit by hurricane Alex and is suffering from power outages this morning. I don’t want to prey on their misfortune and my prayers are with the employees and residents near San Antonio, Texas. I will, however, take a moment to reflect on what this means for the stability of email and online applications hosted at one of the world’s largest and most successful data centers.

Rackspace just told us via phone that their Outlook, OWA (Outlook Web Access) and Entourage systems are experiencing downtime due to power outages caused by hurricane Alex and that email was safe. When we asked the phone support technician how the emails were safe if the servers were offline in San Antonio, Texas, there was a brief pause before a reply was given.

The reality is that email is directed solely to those mail servers and that there was no way to guarantee emails sent to addresses hosted by Rackspace are not going to be bounced to the sender. This is a first for us, as we’ve rarely (if ever) heard of this happening at a company like Rackspace.

Ashworth Consulting offers a backup MX service that will queue your email in the event your mail server is ever down. The email passes through our powerful email servers for SPAM filtering, virus scanning and will not deliver the messages until the system has determined that it’s safe to do so. In a nutshell, your email is almost unbreakable in terms of stability and reliability.

We would like to assure our customers that email and data are 100% operational due to the measures we have taken to ensure data redundancy and reliability. None of our services are affected by the hurricane at this time and your websites and email will continue to remain unhindered by these events.

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1. 2010 Upgrades Coming Soon!

This new platform is being rolled out as we speak and data will begin to be migrated for you free of charge to our new systems as soon as the second week of January 2010. We’ll handle copying of the data and make sure your website is accessible on the new system with all passwords intact.

We’re all extremely excited for this network-wide upgrade and will communicate often through our website on changes happening to our systems, so subscribe to this website via email to the right and you’ll receiving a nightly digest of changes to this website.

This update introduce enhanced processing capabilities, additional bandwidth providers being added to our list of internet sources for hosting your website, RAID-10 hard drive redundancy and the ability to add additional storage, memory and bandwidth resources without experiencing any major downtime as traditional methods would have required.

In fact, we’re upgrading all existing accounts to a larger storage at no additional cost to you. It’s our way of saying “thank you” for sticking with us as we grew our company over the last 10 years. There is a small catch, however…

This migration will require an IP address change. If you’re a shared hosting client (with a single account) and already pointing to our public nameservers for hosting, no change will be required for you. Not a moment of downtime is expected for this switch. However, if you’re a reseller or dedicated customer with custom nameservers (ie., ns1.yourdomain.com), some DNS changes will be necessary on your part in order to avoid any downtime.

Our knowledgeable support staff will be happy to handle the changes for you with no involvement on your part, provided you open a support ticket with your domain registration company’s login information. Once we have this, they’ll be able to make the necessary changes within minutes.

The final DNS change will be made on a Friday late at night to allow for DNS propagation over the weekend.

We truly feel this is in the best interest of all of our clients and will serve the web hosting needs of our clients for years to come in terms of uptime, speed and reliability. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with our staff for questions to be answered in a speedy manner.

Thanks, as always, for being a valued Ashworth Consulting customer and we look forward to providing you with exceptional service in 2010!

Related posts:

1. Network Maintenance on 2/8/2010
2. Email reliability and how to protect your business

When you set your password, including on cPanel, or email accounts, be sure to select one that is hard to guess. But what does “hard to guess” mean?

Take a look at The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time:

From the moment people started using passwords, it didn’t take long to realize how many people picked the very same passwords over and over. Even the way people misspell words is consistent. In fact, people are so predictable that most hackers make use of lists of common passwords just like these. To give you some insight into how predictable humans are, the following is a list of the 500 most common passwords. If you see your password on this list, please change it immediately. Keep in mind that every password listed here has been used by at least hundreds if not thousands of other people.

There are some interesting passwords on this list that show how people try to be clever, but even human cleverness is predictable.

Here is a handy random password generator that I use often. It creates passwords based upon settings you tell it and it even includes a nice human-readable version that phonetically spells out your password. This is perfect for web hosting resellers including a password in a welcome email to their customers.

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While a physical dedicated server can be good choice for some high-end applications and websites, this isn’t always necessary. Our virtual dedicated options allow you to start small and grow the hosting solution as your business grows. In fact, we can have a virtual dedicated server upgraded in as little as one hour from the time we receive the request.

All virtual dedicated servers come with RAID-10 disk redundancy (that’s 8 hard disks!), full root access to do what you need, multiple redundant connections to tier-1 internet backbones and deployed on our powerful 4-core servers. We can even take snapshot backups of your slice for easy restoration at a moment’s notice.

If you have outgrown shared hosting or reseller hosting, we can help tailor a special offering just for your situation. Email us or call for more details. Someone will be in touch shortly to discuss your unique situation.

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