Most web hosting companies offer catch-all email addresses for all their customers and at first it may seem like a fantastic service. With catch-all you don’t have to setup forwarders for each and every email address you need since all email sent to your domain will be forwarded to the same account.

That means that you can have all of the following addresses pointing to the same account without having to set them up individually

• support@sampleaddress.com
• webmaster@sampleaddress.com
• customerservice@sampleaddress.com
• admin@sampleaddress.com
• info@sampleaddress.com
• whateveryoufeellike@sampleaddress.com

Catch-all may seem like a fantastic service, but it’s in fact a big security issue due to spammers all over the world. Since you don’t have to setup each email address individually anything@sampleaddress.com will work on your domain. This can easily be abused by spammers since they can spam whatevertyefeellike@sampeladdress.com and you still get the spam email. In other words, they don’t have to figure out your email address since anything will work!!!!!

I forgot to turn off catch all on my domain xavierinc.com and I noticed today that the account was using amazing 10 Gb of space on the server. Since I only have a simple index file plus a few pictures (nothing more then 100Kb in total) in that account I was really surprised. Due to the catch all on that domain spammers had spammed anything they could figure out including email addresses starting with random letters and numbers like

• 1xexasiufyn3@xvaierinc.com
• 6q6lcyfgrlql@xvaierinc.com
• 4bkqbl73xbuz@xvaierinc.com
• qvsrjje7kdlp@xvaierinc.com
• em8l1lw3d8wp@xvaierinc.com

It took me over an hour to delete all that spam since it was way too much to delete even with rm -rf * so I had to delete about thousand spam emails at the time manually

So make sure you turn catch-all email addresses off on your hosting accounts before you run out of disk space and only setup the email addresses you need. Also stop using common worlds like webmaster@, support@, custoemrservice@ and info@ as email addresses since spammers tend to spam these commonly used addresses alot .

Until the 31st of July 2008 you’ll get a free .com domain name if you purchase annual shared hosting plans from eXavier.com. The promotional pricing will be applied automatically in the cart for you when you add an annual shared hosting plan and the .com together from the shared hosting page.

For example for $3.60/month (12-month plan) you get all this:

• .COM domain name
• 10 GB Space
• 300 GB Transfer
• 100 Email Accounts
• FREE! Software
• 10 MySQL Databases
• 50 Email Forwards
• Forums, Blogging, Photos
• $20 Google® AdWords® Credit¹
• $25 Microsoft® adCenter Credit†
• FREE! Google Webmaster Tools

For more information about our hosting plans and the .com special offer, please visit eXavier.com.

I read a guest post in the Entrecard blog about how to recover your data (i.e. posts and files) in case you lose your blog in a hard drive crash, server fire (like in the case with ThePlanet.com) or in a hacker attack. The article gives you some good advice, but why wait until you’ve already lost everything before you act?

When you see an article like that you shouldn’t just say (or think) “it’s a good article, I have to remember this until it happens to me” or “that will never happen to me”, instead you should create an action list on how to prevent that you end up in a situation where no backups can be found. You should also setup an action plan on how to restore your blog as soon as possible after an unexpected incident.

1. Backup your blog databases - If you got Wordpress as blogging platform you should use one of the many backup plugins that are available. Here are two plugins I found at Wordpress.org: WP-DB-Backup and WP-DB-Manager. I’m sure you will find many other plugins too and if you use another platform then Wordpress you should also be able to find backup solutions. Just search in Google for backup and your blog software.
2. Check your web hosting company’s backup solutions - If you’re at a shared hosting account you shouldn’t just trust that your web hosting company will do backups for you. Check it and make sure they do it daily, otherwise change to another hosting company with better backup routines.If you’re hosting on your own server it’s your own responsibility to do backups. Some server hosting companies offer backups as an extra service and it can be a good investment (not only to make sure you can access your data after an incident, but also because you don’t have to do it yourself). You can also setup hosting control panels like cPanel and many more to FTP backups to a FTP account hosted on any other server you like. Therefore it can be a good investment to get a shared hosting account at for example eXavier.com where you can FTP your backups to. The important thing is to make sure that you FTP account is hosted on another server and in best case also in another data center.
3. Backup your local files - Even if you have all important data on a web server somewhere it could be a good idea to backup your local files every now and then. A good thing could be to get an external hard drive where you can store copies of all your data. You could also get a gmail account, ZIP all your important files and email them to your gmail account. For a small fee you get up to 25 GB space at Gmail!!!!!
4. Create an emergency plan - Do a checklist with things you should do in case your hosting company, the data center where you have your servers or for example your broad band operator can’t get their servers and Internet connections up and running fast enough. On the same list you should include phone numbers to all parties just in case you can’t access Internet to find the phone numbers on each companies web site.
5. Test your backups - Make sure your backups are working (i.e. you can restore your site, blog or forum from the backups you have) before you really need your backups. I’ve learned the hard way that you should never fully trust your backups until you’ve tested that they really work. You should do a test every now and then just to make sure that everything is working as it should.