The founders of BV have always held our company, our personnel and our products to high standards. What we didn’t realize, is how much higher our standards could be. On a scale of 1-10, we always thought we were a 6-7 striving for a 9-10. In the past 10 years, we have witnessed, first hand, some other hosting companies and their products. Reality is, BV is about an 8-9 right now and we are striving for 15. When our brand was born, we offered a good product at a great price. Now we offer a great product at a very good price. Our value and superb uptime has remained superior despite many changes in the industry. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s been a lot fun.

Without further rambling, let’s get to the issues at hand.

We have come up with a few ideas to help this growing issue of “surprise” overages. In the end, it always comes back to responsibility. It’s a lose/lose situation for us. If we set a hard limit on your account, and the instant it hits that limit, your account stops functioning, which is what a lot of providers are doing now, clients are going to miss that crucial email or that extra amount of revenue at key times. If we allow you to use whatever you need, and then bill you for it at the end of the month, clients are unhappy about the overage charge. The consensus we have gathered from clients seems to be, if they are going to have an overage, we let them know ahead of time. The problem is, we don’t know ahead of time. We check resource usage at least one time, every 24 hours, on each account. If the account is using more than it’s share of resources, an overage invoice is created. Once an overage is detected, it cannot be avoided. There is no forewarning available (our crystal ball is on the fritz).

Currently, about 10% of clients are utilizing a quota on their pop accounts. Quotas can be added to each and every account, to help prevent overages due to spam, mail bombs or simple non-usage. If you don't have a mail quota, you should consider it.

Feel free to join a discussion about overages and what we can do to minimize the impact they have on your hosting experience. The ground rules will be laid out in the forums and we can throw this topic around until we are Blue in the face (get it?).

Email/Spam Blacklists - I don't know if my fingers will let me get through this portion without breaking down. Effective 2/1/07 Blue Virtual began referencing email blacklists from various sources, as well as compiling our own running list. We know how much our clients hate spam. It’s extremely expensive for us to even offer spam checking and filtering; keep in mind, we added that at no extra charge to our clients. As our client base keeps growing, our email intake and output keep growing. For every 1 piece of legitimate mail we receive, we estimate we receive 70 pieces of junk email.

BV has been bitten by these spam blacklists in the past. Our email server IP has been listed on more than one occasion and every time it was our position that it wasn’t our problem, it was the company relying on these blacklists. We are now under that umbrella. We don’t like it, we don’t approve of it, but it’s in the best interest of our customers and at the end of the day, that’s what counts.

The ramifications of this change can be from mild to wild, depending on the day. Some clients will never see a change. Most clients will see a reduced spam level. Others, regretfully, will encounter a time when someone sent them an email that was rejected due to being blacklisted as a spammer. The benefit to all, is having most of their mail checked by our spam filtering software. Without the lists in place, there is simply too much email to scan, backing up the spam filtering system and ultimately the entire email system. Our clients have displayed the level of importance they place on email and we are taking steps today to make sure your email service remains highly available, as the rest of our services.

SPF Records - In a continuing effort to fight spam we have begun to implement SPF in our mail system. The first step of this process was to install default SPF records on all shared hosting domains. This means that providers who check incoming mail for SPF can better detect forged e-mails that you didn't send. SPF is implemented by adding special information to your domain's DNS records. We have automatically added these for all clients. Next, we will be implementing a new system to check incoming messages to our network for SPF validity. You can learn more about SPF at: http://www.openspf.org.

Product Changes - Our dedicated server offerings will be modified in the near future. We are working with hardware vendors to secure an agreement of products we can offer our clients and potential clients. Expect to see higher end systems available, such as SATA II and SCSI options, Dual and Quad core processor options, and higher end networking options, like private vlans, gigabit network interfaces, etc. We also will be offering a great deal more of management options, for customers who want to employ us as their IT staff. Even custom project work is something we will consider. We look for these options to become available by mid-year.

This newsletter is just to get us caught up with our clients. We wanted you to know we are still working just as hard as ever. BV has matured, more than we like to admit sometimes. We have always had a policy of openness and honesty and that continues today. Join us in the Client forums to discuss anything and everything. To give you some motivation to get in there and start chatting it up, we have released a sneak peek of our new logo that we will begin implementing very soon. Check it out here - http://forum.bluevirtual.com/viewtopic.php?t=7420.

As always, thank you for your continued support and patronage. We truly are astonished at how loyal and talented our customers are.