Round Tale

One of the first and most annoying things that can happen to a new web site owner is being blasted with spam.  There is a dilemma presented when wanting to have potential customers or clients contact you or your company.  Either your email has to be publicly posted or you will need to enable a form to allow quick and easy contact.  When you do implement either choice, spammers will come and they will do as much damage as is possible.

Email link – bad idea

The first thing that should be done is to toss out the idea of publicly placing your email address in any form that can be clicked as a link.  Using a linked email address publicly is an open invitation to spammers.  Nothing can be more unpleasant than having to start off your business day wading through hundreds upon hundreds of spam content in your email in-box.  If you must use this route, simply place your email in text only – this will make it harder for a potential spammer as they will have to physically copy and paste your address into any email.  Inconvenience is the bane of the spammer.

Contact form – can be attacked

If you’ve decided to place a contact form anywhere within your web site, you’ll want to enable some type of security to ensure that an actual human is utilizing the form.  This sounds simple enough because, after all, the purpose of the form is to gather human information.  However, most email forms have a standard “name”, “email”,  “subject”, “content” style to them that is easily recognized and exploited by spammers.  Using this standard information, spammers use automated systems to attack a contact form – computer to computer.  What can stump them is requiring something that only a human can input or answer and that isn’t part of the standard email form.  This is where Captcha comes in.

Contact form with Captcha – better idea

Captcha is a type of test that is used to ensure human interaction.  The premise behind Captcha is that computers should not be able to solve something that requires human input.  The very early implementations of Captcha were simple generations of a word or series of letters with some small amount of warping.  However, spammers quickly adjusted to this warping and this initial Captcha implementation had to be abandoned.  Modern Captcha uses two to three regular words that are segmented and have lines through the words making it much more difficult to automatically guess via a computer system.

This all culminates into a small bit of either PHP or Javascript that is placed within your form before the submit button coding.  After filling out the rest of the form, a user must then enter the correct words generated within the Captcha coding.  You can set the form to lock out a user after a certain number of errors thus staving off the possible attack of spammers for yet another day.

Conclusion

Of course, the simplest way to avoid spammers at all is by not allowing any sort of email contact within your site.  But this is not a feasible option – after all, you have your web site online for the purpose of contacting new and old customers or clients.  So, before putting your email form online, use a bit of quick security and incorporate Captcha.

San Francisco, California – (The Hosting News) – September 3, 2009 – Managed hosting, cloud hosting and colocation solutions provider, Hosting.com, has debuted its new VMware (NYSE: VMW) vCloud Express solution, offering instant provisioning, consumption-based pricing (pay by the hour) and unlimited, dynamic compute resources.

Hosting.com will be among the first to offer this new class of VMware Virtualized service that that can be purchased, consumed and adjusted in a pay-as-you-go model. Hosting.com vCloud Express will be available as a beta service beginning September 1, 2009.

Craig McLellan, CTO of Hosting.com noted, ”vCloud Express delivers control directly to customers. They can setup new accounts, adjust virtual machine resources, turn additional machines on or off and deploy and execute virtual machine commands with no human interaction – if so desired. We will continue to innovate to deliver on the promises of capacity and infrastructure on-demand, utility-based pricing, and cloud interconnectivity.”

This solution introduces true cross-platform functionality to the marketplace that is compatible with technology the industry embraces and utilizes. vCloud Express is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution that will run on Hosting.com’s Cloud Enterprise infrastructure and is the latest announcement on Hosting.com’s portfolio of cloud hosting solutions. Consumers currently utilizing VMware internally will have compatibility between their internal infrastructure and external infrastructure resources used for application development and testing, capacity on demand, and general outsourced infrastructure needs.

Dan Chu, VP of Emerging Markets, VMware added, ”Hosting.com continues to provide cloud solutions and market insights that help define and evolve this quickly growing industry. Their commitment to providing exemplary service and rapid product development made them a natural fit as a vCloud Express service provider.”

Hosting.com will offer vCloud Express through its Cloud Enterprise solution. Cloud Enterprise leverages the latest in virtualization platform technology with VMware vSphere 4, and is highly available on both the computing and disk infrastructures. Hosting.com has made significant investments in enterprise-class technologies such as EMC, Dell, Juniper, F5, and Intel to deliver a robust, standards-based cloud infrastructure to clients demanding unparalleled performance and security.

Jason Waxman, General Manager, High Density Computing Division, Intel remarked, ”Hosting.com has made a promise to deliver Enterprise-Class cloud hosting services to their customers. The Intel Xeon 5500 processor family delivers outstanding benefits to enterprises in performance, energy efficiency and virtualization. Investments in products like Intel’s Xeon 5500 processor family help Hosting.com to deliver this promise to their clients via cloud services.”

Hosting.com has a portfolio of Cloud Hosting solutions including Cloud Enterprise, Cloud Dedicated and Cloud VPS – and now vCloud Express – that reduce costs, improve efficiency and provide extreme flexibility to businesses of all sizes. The vCloud Express launch is one of many product announcements Hosting.com will make over the next several months to provide more flexibility and control to hosting customers.

Hosting.com’s vCloud Express pricing starts at $.042 per hour and is available immediately.

Hosting.com’s portfolio of Cloud Hosting products are being featured at VMworld 2009, expected to draw more than 12,000 attendees. Hosting.com activities at VMworld include: CTO, Craig McLellan’s Super Session discussion on cloud hosting with VMware’s Dan Chu, VP of Emerging Markets; ideaLaunch.com, a Hosting.com Cloud Enterprise client, will present on a Client Panel; and Hosting.com will demo its cloud solutions multiple times on the tradeshow floor in the Hosting.com and Intel exhibits, as well as in the VMware vCloud Pavilion.

Hosting.com provides enterprise colocation, cloud computing, dedicated hosting, managed hosting, disaster recovery, and business continuance services to a global customer base demanding a high level of security, reliability, and responsiveness. Hosting.com monitors, manages, and enhances the web-based platforms of Web 2.0 companies, software as a service (SaaS) providers, content distribution networks (CDN), and medium to large enterprises whose Web presence is crucial and high availability mandatory.

Hosting.com currently operates SAS 70 Type II certified datacenters in Irvine, CA; Louisville, KY; Newark, DE; San Francisco, CA; and Denver, CO.

To learn more, please visit: www.hosting.com/vcloudexpress.

San Francisco, California – (The Hosting News) – September 3, 2009 – Managed hosting, cloud hosting and colocation solutions provider, Hosting.com, has debuted its new VMware (NYSE: VMW) vCloud Express solution, offering instant provisioning, consumption-based pricing (pay by the hour) and unlimited, dynamic compute resources.

Hosting.com will be among the first to offer this new class of VMware Virtualized service that that can be purchased, consumed and adjusted in a pay-as-you-go model. Hosting.com vCloud Express will be available as a beta service beginning September 1, 2009.

Craig McLellan, CTO of Hosting.com noted, ”vCloud Express delivers control directly to customers. They can setup new accounts, adjust virtual machine resources, turn additional machines on or off and deploy and execute virtual machine commands with no human interaction – if so desired. We will continue to innovate to deliver on the promises of capacity and infrastructure on-demand, utility-based pricing, and cloud interconnectivity.”

This solution introduces true cross-platform functionality to the marketplace that is compatible with technology the industry embraces and utilizes. vCloud Express is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution that will run on Hosting.com’s Cloud Enterprise infrastructure and is the latest announcement on Hosting.com’s portfolio of cloud hosting solutions. Consumers currently utilizing VMware internally will have compatibility between their internal infrastructure and external infrastructure resources used for application development and testing, capacity on demand, and general outsourced infrastructure needs.

Dan Chu, VP of Emerging Markets, VMware added, ”Hosting.com continues to provide cloud solutions and market insights that help define and evolve this quickly growing industry. Their commitment to providing exemplary service and rapid product development made them a natural fit as a vCloud Express service provider.”

Hosting.com will offer vCloud Express through its Cloud Enterprise solution. Cloud Enterprise leverages the latest in virtualization platform technology with VMware vSphere 4, and is highly available on both the computing and disk infrastructures. Hosting.com has made significant investments in enterprise-class technologies such as EMC, Dell, Juniper, F5, and Intel to deliver a robust, standards-based cloud infrastructure to clients demanding unparalleled performance and security.

Jason Waxman, General Manager, High Density Computing Division, Intel remarked, ”Hosting.com has made a promise to deliver Enterprise-Class cloud hosting services to their customers. The Intel Xeon 5500 processor family delivers outstanding benefits to enterprises in performance, energy efficiency and virtualization. Investments in products like Intel’s Xeon 5500 processor family help Hosting.com to deliver this promise to their clients via cloud services.”

Hosting.com has a portfolio of Cloud Hosting solutions including Cloud Enterprise, Cloud Dedicated and Cloud VPS – and now vCloud Express – that reduce costs, improve efficiency and provide extreme flexibility to businesses of all sizes. The vCloud Express launch is one of many product announcements Hosting.com will make over the next several months to provide more flexibility and control to hosting customers.

Hosting.com’s vCloud Express pricing starts at $.042 per hour and is available immediately.

Hosting.com’s portfolio of Cloud Hosting products are being featured at VMworld 2009, expected to draw more than 12,000 attendees. Hosting.com activities at VMworld include: CTO, Craig McLellan’s Super Session discussion on cloud hosting with VMware’s Dan Chu, VP of Emerging Markets; ideaLaunch.com, a Hosting.com Cloud Enterprise client, will present on a Client Panel; and Hosting.com will demo its cloud solutions multiple times on the tradeshow floor in the Hosting.com and Intel exhibits, as well as in the VMware vCloud Pavilion.

Hosting.com provides enterprise colocation, cloud computing, dedicated hosting, managed hosting, disaster recovery, and business continuance services to a global customer base demanding a high level of security, reliability, and responsiveness. Hosting.com monitors, manages, and enhances the web-based platforms of Web 2.0 companies, software as a service (SaaS) providers, content distribution networks (CDN), and medium to large enterprises whose Web presence is crucial and high availability mandatory.

Hosting.com currently operates SAS 70 Type II certified datacenters in Irvine, CA; Louisville, KY; Newark, DE; San Francisco, CA; and Denver, CO.

To learn more, please visit: www.hosting.com/vcloudexpress.