Build Your Startup Internet and Mobile Hosting Business: Step 1

‘How do I start a simple or complex Internet and Mobile hosting service easily?’

Here is a little secret, something that I would love to share with you. Something you can chew on immediately.

Previously I have written on HowEVERWORKS helps you with SQL Injection Attacks – however, I believe that even knowing, understanding, and performing some simple protection does require quite a bit of effort on your part. Well just being me, I simply love shortcuts! You know, the easy way to get things done. This ‘secret’ was meant to get you there. Build an Internet or Mobile hosting service easily.

Today, I would like to introduce to you this ‘secret’, and over the next few days I hope to give you practical tips on how to use it.

This is a series on building your startup Internet and Mobile hosting business easily follow this series here.

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How EVERWORKS Helps You WITH SQL Injection Attacks

Recently I conducted an interview with Jacky Chen, EVERWORKS’S Leading System Architect. I was rather shocked to find out that a SQL Injection Attack is rather serious. Don’t take my word for it; hear what Jacky has to say with his experience with it.

This brings me back to one of my bad experiences few years back when I just stepped into my 1^st employment after my graduation. In those days, security is more emphasized on exposure of the source codes, or a networking related issue; seldom looking over the security of the database. On one Monday morning, after coming back from a long weekend, the whole development team was shocked after discovering that the whole production database was gone. Lucky for the team the database was restored from daily backups that had earlier been implemented. After much investigation, we discovered a security loophole on the website pages which led to this catastrophic issue. The ‘hacker’ has injected SQL commands to delete all the tables in the database via the form’s input boxes.

I want to give you a solution so that you can perform a fix-it-yourself action with stuff that actually make sense! (Hey I am no software engineer, coder, or programmer; when I see code all I see is stuff from Matrix.)

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No Fuss. 6 Hour Response.

I have a hosting problem. Well it doesn't seem to be a big problem, but I end up wrecking my brains to solve that very problem; personally it is a pain to go through endless online help articles trying to resolve the issue on my own. It takes up all of my productive time. (You know? That one problem that we all face, that one problem we just can’t seem to solve!)

‘Now just how do I continue to do work with

confidence knowing that help is always just around the corner?’

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What is our Ratio of Oversea Upstream in Hybrid Network?

Due to the good respond in our previous 'Review' of Hybrid Bandwidth System, and a lot of people asking us on how our Hybrid is actually working or managing the incoming and outgoing oversea traffic for these servers hosted under the Hybrid network. Actually, there is a policy in managing this network to ensure our clients's oversea traffic are being well taken care. In short, our policy is 80:20 Ratio.

All our Hybrid Bandwidth System is being configured with this ratio configuration to ensure the clients are treating fairly. For example, if you are subscribed to 1 Mbps of our Hybrid Bandwidth, mean you are getting 1 Mbps dedicated bandwidth from our MYIX pool, and all your International access to your servers are managed from the shared bandwidth pool, where the shared bandwidth pool is configured with 80:20 ratio of our total subscription of MYIX network.

How this 80:20 Ratio Works? 
For example, if we have total dedicated 50 Mbps of MYIX subscription, then we will have 20 Mbps dedicated of International bandwidth in placed.


Will my customers experience slow access to my servers? 
Yes. This maybe happened when the shared bandwidth of International bandwidth is full. When this is happened and you are based in Malaysia, then you will not experience the slow connection.

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Report: 69% of Plan Passenger Use Smartphone or Tablet During Flights

APEX (The Airline Passenger Experience Association) and CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) has recently join conducted an interesting survey on American airline passenger, and they found out that 69% of them will use their personal electronic devices such smartphone or tablet – during flights.

Doug Johnson, VP of technology policy at CEA, said: "Airline passengers have come to rely on their smartphones, tablets and e-Readers as essential travel companions. Understanding the attitudes and behaviors of passengers that are using electronic devices while traveling will help the FAA make informed decisions." Four in ten passengers (40%) would like to use their devices during all phases of flight, including take-off and landing. With 28%, smartphones are the most commonly used devices during flights, followed by laptops on 25%, tablets on 23%, MP3 players on 23% and e-readers on 13%. 

Meanwhile, we also found out another interest figure on their survey, that 59% of passengers will always turn their devices completely off when requested, 21% of passenger will switch their devices to 'Flight Mode' or 'Plane Mode', while 5% of them will just turn their devices completely off the entire journey. 

As we know this report is being conducted to understand the attitudes and behaviors of American passengers, but I think many Asia or even Malaysian passengers will have the similar attitudes like what stated in this report. Meanwhile, the steady growth of budget airlines (or no-frills airline) in Asia market such as AirAsia.com, has changed the attitudes and behaviors of Asia passengers during their flights. Most of the passenger will actually their own devices such smartphone or tablet – during flights.

After reviewed on this report, we at EVERWORKS.com are strongly believe that mobile content business will be a next biggest business in Asia market. Hence, hosting of mobile content will definitely play an very important role in making sure all these mobile contents are delivering to mobile devices with good and stable connection. EVERWORKS.com’s Colocation facility gives you more than just state-of-the art security and fail-safe provisions – we give you the direct connection to one of the Asia’s largest, next-generation fiber-optic networks. 

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Is SMS Marketing still important for 13th Malaysian General Election?

Some people said, one of the biggest successful marketing channel that engaged by Opposition Party in the 12th General Election is 'SMS marketing'. Do you agree with this? I think many people will say YES if still remember on what happened in 5 years back. But what about 5 years later in this 13th General Election? Will SMS marketing still popular in this 13th General Election? 

So, let's us review this issue together and to see on what happened in SMS industry for the past 20 days before our 13th General Election or Pilihan Raya Umum ke-13 (PRU 13) on 5th of May 2013. During this pre-election period, we still see the 3 standard types of SMS channel that being used in 2008, and still being used this time to promote their election campaign. What are the 3 standard SMS channel? 

1 : Bulk SMS via short code 

Sample SMS for Bulk SMS

This is the regulated method by local Telcos in Malaysia. That mean each of these SMS are sent directly via local Telcos by licensed company such as EVERWORKS.com. As we know, this method is usually the most expensive method in market. The price is about RM0.09 to RM0.06 (depending on their volume). 

From the sample here, you may notice this SMS is sent from '63001', where this is a registered short code that by belong to a licensed SMS company. Of course, this SMS company must have agreement with all local Telcos, such as Maxis, Celcom, and DiGi in order to provide such SMS services to their client. 

From our survey in this 13th election, we believe this is the most popular method for our Malaysia politicians to delivery their message to their targeted audience.

2 : International Bulk SMS

This method will be much cheaper than the method#1 as all these SMS will sending into Malaysia Telcos via international providers. The market price for this channel is about RM0.05 to RM0.04 per SMS. But this method has been banned by all Telcos, and even MCMC (Malaysian Communications And Multimedia Commission) has banned this method due to some security reasons. Many Telcos in Malaysia has already implemented some filtration tool to prevent such SMSs to reach their mobile users. 

How to differential whether this SMS is from International bulk SMS? The most simple way to identify international bulk SMS is from the SMS's Sender ID. It's sender ID is usually come with some international number such as +143839301113. From our survey, we found out some politicians are still using this method in sending their political message to the mobile users. But all their SMS content did not carried or mentioned any of name or party. They are merely to carry out some general message that related to everyone in Malaysia. In summary, this method is cheaper than local bulk SMS, but giving the same delivery speed like local bulk SMS. The main disadvantage is Low Delivery Rate, as many of our local Telcos already started to block international SMS. 

3 : P2P SMS via GSM modem

Sample of Enterprise GSM Modems (Side View)

What is P2P SMS? P2P mean Person-to-Person messaging method that initial by normal Telcos SIM card, and this method is just like how we send a SMS to person via our mobile phone. This method is always the most direct, and most high delivery rate (I would say 100% delivery). P2P SMS is among the cheapest method in the market, selling price about RM0.05 to RM0.03 per SMS (depending on volume). But the main problem is the Delivery Speed. From testing, the speed of sending one SMS will take about 5-6 second from one modem (that's why P2P provider will have purchase a lot of modem in order to increase their sending speed). 

Sample of Enterprise GSM Modems (Top View)

From our survey, many politicians are engaged to this method to delivery their SMS, which I believe they are engaged to a 3rd party to delivery their SMS. How it work? Basically, the SMS Provider will purchase some SMS modem and local prepaid SIM cards from each local Telcos, then they will configure these modems to work with a SMS broadcasting software such as SMS Caster that installed on a server or even personal computer. 

Sample of P2P SMS

In P2P industry, SMS Caster is among the most popular SMS broadcasting software for GSM modem. User can easily upload all their contact (from local excel file) into the local server or personal computer, and you can even schedule your broadcasting campaign easily from this software. 

In summary, SMS marketing for election is always a big challenge for the government in making sure no one is abusing the telecommunication channel to broadcast some misleading or fake information to the mobile users in this election, as this may affect to the stability of our country. Below is the news that I copied from TheEdge and it did mentioned on the regulation if anyone has abused the used of SMS for their election purpose.

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Real Time 160Gbps of DDoS Attack Mitigated by Prolexic

Prolexic has recently shared with EVERWORKS on interesting video about an 'Actual 160 Gbps DDoS attack being mitigated by Prolexic’s Global Network'. In Malaysia, I guess an attack of 160Gbps can actually bring down the entire nation's internet system. So, I think many our followers may be interested on this new video that documented by Prolexic, as well a to visualizes on how Prolexic mitigated a sustained 160 Gbps, 120 million packet-per-second (pps) attack. From this video, you can actually see how Prolexic's Scrubbing Center is filtering all the incoming attacked traffic before passing the clean traffic to their client.

The video has bee uploaded at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Hi231ER6SfE#! (The DDoS attack occurred earlier this month and was directed against one of Prolexic’s enterprise clients in April, 2013).

Who is Prolexic?

Prolexic Technologies is the world’s largest, most trusted distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection and mitigation provider. Able to absorb the largest and most complex DDoS attacks ever launched, Prolexic protects and restores mission-critical, Internet-facing infrastructures for global enterprises and government agencies within minutes. Ten of the world’s largest banks, as well as leading companies in e-Commerce, payment processing, travel and hospitality, gaming, and other at-risk industries rely on Prolexic for DDoS protection.

EVERWORKS & Prolexic 

EVERWORKS have been working with Prolexic since 2008 to incorporate with our DDoS Protection solution in Malaysia. In our record working with Prolexic, they have successfully prevented a DDoS attack of 6Gps for our clients who colocated their server at our datacenter in Malaysia. All our clients are protected under Prolexic's Proxy mode solution, and all their Malaysian IP address will be hide behind Prolexic's proxy server or Scrubbing Center. To know more about EVERWORKS's DDoS Protection solution, please visit our product site at http://www.everworks.com/Services/DDoS

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