Mail Updates

Some of our Enterprise Hosting customers have had these features for a while now, but they filtering back across all packages now.

MailBox Quotes

We’ve worked with a number of customers to figure out how certain mailboxes were going over their assigned quotes and updated the system. The improvements mean that webmail, desktop and even your phone should be able to see the correct quota when set.

MailBox Search

All mailboxes now have search indexing enabled and available using full IMAP search. Roundcube, our preferred webmail client, supports the interaction with the server-side search indexes, as does Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. We’ve already heard back on improvements from Apple users too.

Your very first search on a large mailbox may be a little slow as the system doesn’t enable the index until at least one search takes place. After that, results should be incredibly quick to return.

Spam Filtering

As with some of our previous mail upgrades, we’ve worked hard to clamp down some of the rules. This new update has worked well with some of our larger mail customers and is now being rolled out to all other accounts.

That said, we’ve much more coming. We hope to be able to port back features like our auto-whitelisting and per-mailbox auto levelling in the next couple of months too. Both of these combined have proved very effective in reducing false-positives and false-negatives.

Server Upgrades

Beyond what we’ve listed below, a number of other improvements have been rolled out to reduce disk latency, increase CPU response times and all together make your site that little bit more responsive. While subtle enough that you may not notice, we’ve seen measured improvements on site response times for some of the more complex installs.

MySQL Server

There has been quite a bit of work going on to improve the speed of MySQL. One such improvement was to ensure even more of your data sits natively in memory so there isn’t any disk lag.

We also have some upgrades to the control panel coming to help developers with MySQL over the next few months but if there is anything in particular you are looking for, please do let us know.

MySQL Backups

We’ve upgraded the scripts we use to do our MySQL backups and they’ve been running across all servers for over a month now. The benefits are that your database spends less time locked when we are doing a full backup run. Our largest database lock time has dropped by almost 90%.

In case you are wondering, why do we lock the database? This will ensure we get consistent backups. If it ever comes to recovery, we can be sure that it will restore correctly too. Things are also tested quite often so you can have piece of mind. More information on the backup system is on our blog.

New Control Panel

Okay, so not really new, but it looks so great we are calling it new. The whole look and feel has been re-vamped and things generally made easier. Log on today and let us know what you think or if there is anything in particular you’d like improved.

One major new feature we have for our resellers is the ability to brand the control panel. Yup, you read that right, a fully brand-able control panel, and no, we don’t just mean changing the logo.

Wrap-Up

We have more to come so stay tuned. For existing customers, check inside your control panel for some special…

Over the past year we have been working quietly behind the scenes upgrading our mail infrastructure and adding features to the control panel. What began as a simple upgrade to improve speed has expanded out all the way to additional server side – user level spam filtering, and lots in between. Read on to get an overview of the different features we have added, and even those you may not have known existed.

Server Side – Out of Office

An out of office reply is what you need for those times when you are off work. The server sends a nice email to anyone to emails in your absence, all while your email client is not turned off.

Even though this features has been in the control panel for some time, it is still regularly requested. You can find it in the Mail Manger section when logged into your control panel.

Mail Relay / Non-Local Email

Sometimes referred to a Backup MX, you can now use Vade as a secondary email server should you run your own. While previously you needed to contact Support for this, all the settings are inside of the Mail Manager under Mail Domains. First set the domain to Non-Local, then adjust the transport to where you want the email to be forwarded to.

You can also choose not to use Vade for email and simply turn off local email here. This will force our email server to use whatever DNS entries you have specified.

Updates to Spam Filters

Spam filtering is one of those items that is constantly being worked on. And we here at Vade are continuing to update the different sections to make it more effective.

Over the past year we have improved the hit ratios, both for detecting spam correctly, and reducing the number of incorrectly tagged emails. Because we understand that you’d rather not miss an important email, we always side to less false positives rather than less spam getting through.

All these updates tie closely into the rest of the features.

Customisable (per user) whitelist/blacklist email addresses

For those times when you want to block a particular email from sending mail to yourself, a black list is the way to go. We have expanded it out so that the lists are done per user and you have the ability to set the scoring on them. As such you can determine if you just want it filtered as spam, or even to a level that gets it deleted.

Multiple Notifications

One thing we heard back was that one invoice notice wasn’t enough. We are all human, and getting the renewal notice doesn’t always mean that that we’ll pay right there and then. Sometimes life has to take preference and we forget. We’ve all been there.

As of right now, you’ll get a notice at 30 days out, 14 days, 7 days, 3 days and then 1 day. You can pay anytime during this period too. Once it goes overdue, we can make no guarantees about things staying online as usually the domain registries shut things down, but we’ll give grace on the hosting side. And of course your data remains safe.

Invoice History

In the past we’ve used more than one system for generating invoices for different sets of customers. Since we have it all centralised and accessible by you, our customer, you can easily gain access to invoices, account balances and statements. Not monumental by any stretch, but our aim is always to make your life easier.

Other Features

The developers are adding order features quite regularly as well as finishing the integration right back to the control panel systems. For those with multiple accounts, you will be able to manage them all from one, central location. The authorised user list as well as contact details are all update-able through the new billing interface. In fact, its goal is eventually to become something more…

Watch this space.

The new quick order form has three fields, your name, your email, and your domain. Yes there is an assumption that you want to register a new domain and put it on our brilliant Primus Web Hosting Package, but we have found that this is a pretty common option.

So you submit the details…

And then what? It will ask you to confirm things and pay via our secure, third party gateway. Once the payment goes through, our sales team will get to work and start provisioning your order. Next, you will get a Welcome Email with details to login to your site. If you are an existing customer, your order will be tied into your existing billing account too so everything stays in the one place for you. As quick as three clicks!

Other Options

As always, you can just contact us using our web form or email us at sales@vade.ie and we can process the order too. We are always here to help and will do our best to accommodate any order you may have.

This is only going to be available for the Month of January and only via the link below.

In the theme of the year, you’ll get 2.011G of Space and 20.11G of data transfer allowance as well as all the usual features found on our web hosting packages. And all for €20.11 a year for the lifetime of your account.

Order Now

If you need some web design or web development, remember we can help with both, handling everything from start to finish, leaving you to take care of what is important to you.

Contact Us now for a fully customised package, suited just to you.

For reference, we can also register .ie, .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .in, .mobi, .asia, .name, .co.in, .tv, .ws, .bz, .cc, .org.uk, .me.uk, .net.in, .org.in, .ind.in, .firm.in, .gen.in, .mn, .us.com, .eu.com, .uk.com, .uk.net, .gb.com, .gb.net, .de.com, .cn.com, .qc.com, .kr.com, .ae.org, .br.com, .hu.com, .jpn.com, .no.com, .ru.com, .sa.com, .se.com, .se.net, .uy.com, and .za.com domains. Phew.

We are always working on increasing the services we can offer our customers, so if there is a domain you want that isn’t listed. Contact Us and we’ll find it for you.

In line with all the feedback, some changes have emerged.

New Packages

Firstly things are now simplified a little. We have reduced the number of packages down to three. Our new Primus Web Hosting Package can give you up to 10G of space, up to 100G of monthly bandwidth transfer allowance, and can take up to 10 individual sites. And all from €2.37 per month. It is a deal not to be missed.

If you need more, there is our Professional Web Hosting Package and our premium level, Enterprise Web Hosting Package.

A new thing with our packages is the multi-year options. Some people like paying for more upfront and so do we. But unlike other people running this deal, we think that if you are willing to pay for more than one year upfront, then we should give something back to you. The longer you sign up for, the more you get. And if you pay for 3 years, we’ll even give you an additional 5% discount on top of the larger package.

New Prices

New packages mean new prices and we think you’ll like our new prices. Especially in the current climate, it is always nice to get more for less, and that is exactly what we are aiming to do.

We also reduced our .ie Domain price by a staggering 50% last week. Why not get yours now?

Contacting Us

Email will always be the quickest method of contacting us and we guarantee a response within a maximum of two hours during business hours, (it is usually a lot less) and a maximum of 12 hours out of business hours for non critical items. We do pride ourselves on our customer support and should you ever not be completely satisfied, please contact directors@vade.ie for an immediate response.

Not convinced, check out some of the nice things our customers have had to say.

Really its just that simple. Fill in the form over here, telling us what we are missing or why you didn’t buy today, and as soon as we can fill the gap, you’ll get free hosting on our Primus Web Hosting package for 1 full year (subject to our normal T&C of course).

Where is the catch???

We know we know, these things are usually too good to be true and there is always is a catch. Well to keep the higher ups happy, there is one or two small ones for this.

You need to fill out the form in full.
Obviously if we can’t contact you, we can’t give you some free hosting can we?

The feedback needs to be printable.
We aren’t looking for a story fit for an evening newspaper, what we mean by this is that it can’t just be random text. If it has a point, then that is enough. If it is a missing feature you are after, more is better. The more information we have, the more likely we are to get it right.

Domains are not free.
It is free hosting after all. We’d like if you bought your domains from us, but it isn’t something we require. We would like if you told us why, but again it isn’t required. We do need to know the domain you’ll be hosting so we can add it to the package.

And that is it!

Not much to it is there now. So go on. Contact Us. Help us help you.

The first of the new features is the ability to be notified when you are getting close to your limit for either bandwidth usage, or disk space usage. This feature can be found in the Account Utilities section of the control panel. Using this feature will allow you to define at what level you want to receive the alerts, and to what email address you want them sent. A mail will then be sent once a day if you are past this limit.

The second of the new features which we have just released is not entirely finished. What is present in the control panel works, it is just that we have a few more features to come and the functionality has not been added to the mailadmin site you can give to your users. So if you haven’t guessed, we have added some more SPAM filtering features. It is being constantly expanded too but if there is anything in particular that you are after, contact us and let us know.

Right now you will have the ability to add email addresses to the domain white/black list. We are already working on expanding this feature out to include an individual list for every mailbox on your account. This feature can be found inside of the Mail Manager section of the Control Panel.

White/black listing can be done on either a hard basis where you say always accept, or always reject, or via a soft basis where you add a little bit of weighting in either direction. Great for those people who like forwarding on silly mailing list type mails, but still occasionally send on “useful” email.

As with our entire core infrastructure, each nameserver is physically distributed in different locations.

What this means for you is an even lower chance that a failure could bring you website down. A failure of one of these machines should go unnoticed. Better yet, it means faster response times for your websites.

As always, please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.