Category: General

Email, done right

As the cost of living continues to rise, at XYZulu we’re committed to offering you more for less.

We understand that email is a vital tool for your business, that’s why we’ve created an email hosting solution that’s more reliable, secure, and feature-rich than ever before.

To help you stay ahead of the spammers and hackers, we are now offering you dedicated email hosting with the same level of service we provide our customers that have managed website hosting services.

We’re calling it abcxyz.email

There are many choices when it comes to email hosting, but these are 4 essentials:

  1. Deliverability: When you send/are sent an email, you need to know it’s going to be delivered.
  2. Spam: You hate it. We hate it. Can you see less of it? Yes, on our new email hosting platform.
  3. Access: You need to be able to read your emails how and when YOU want to. We offer 3 different webmail options as well as full IMAP (sync your email across all your devices) support. Read your email via webmail and/or your own desktop/mobile email client. We support them all mainstream email clients.
  4. Control: We give you full control over your email accounts, spam filters, forwarding options and vacation auto-responders.

Why consider our dedicated email hosting plans?

  1. Enhanced Performance:  Our new platform is built on the latest technology, delivering lightning-fast performance which minimizes downtime.
  2. Advanced Security: Your data’s security is our top priority. Our platform employs advanced security measures to safeguard your sensitive information from threats and breaches.
  3. Seamless Migration: We have streamlined the migration process to make it as smooth as possible. We will handle the entire migration, ensuring that your emails are transferred seamlessly.
  4. Feature-Rich Experience: Our new platform offers a range of powerful features designed to enhance your email experience, including improved collaboration tools, customisable email filters, and an intuitive user interface.
  5. Responsive Support: We will assist you every step of the way. We’re here to help should you have any questions or encounter any issues during the migration process.

P.S. If you have any questions about the migration process or our new email hosting platform, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re here to help!

Cloudflare Turnstile – easy and effective CAPTCHA

Cloudflare Turnstile – easy and effective CAPTCHA

It is estimated that humans collectively spend 500 years solving CAPTCHAs each day, so why does blog/comment spam still make it through to your inbox?

Enter Cloudflare Turnstile a simple and effective CAPTCHA that reduces the spam and is seamless for visitors. You can read more about this free product from Cloudflare here on their blog. Keep in mind that Turnstile plugins and components already exist for WordPress/Joomla etc, so implementation is just a few clicks away.

We’ve been testing Cloudflare Turnstile on WordPress and Joomla sites with great results. Customers are reporting a reduction, or even total elimination of spam via their contact forms and comment plugins/components. Integration is also simple and can be configured in a few minutes. As part of our Managed Hosting approach, if you are a current customer simply get in touch and we can set this up for you.

Are you taking advantage of our Password Privacy Protection service? We’re ready to share our knowledge and skills to help protect your personal information. Need help getting a password manager setup? Not sure how to use 2FA (two factor authentication). Heard about hardware keys for 2FA but don’t know how to use them? These are all part of the service we are now providing, contact us today and we’ll help you keep safe and spam free.

Zero Trust SSH

SSH is arguably the most basic service on a linux based server. It’s secure as well, when using SSH keys (and with root login and passwords disabled) but it’s still a big target for the “bad guys” (mostly automated bots). You can run SSH on a non-standard port (not port 22), but that is just security through obscurity, which really isn’t good practice.

Well, then along came Zero Trust. Cloudflare perhaps didn’t invent this, but they are the biggest proponent of it.
What is it? In my own words, it’s VPN less authentication for web and anything else you can access via the internet. Now we can authenticate down to the user, not just the entire network (like a VPN).
How does it work? You authenticate to the Zero Trust Service via a webpage and once that is done, any applications that you have been given access to are automatically authenticated or protected behind the Zero Trust Provider, in this case Cloudflare
Can you do the same for SSH? YES SECURELY and IN THE BROWSER. It’s not new, it’s free (for up to 50 applications) and it’s easy to setup. See the original blog post here.

The basic steps are:

  • A domain pointed to your Cloudflare account
  • Setup a Cloudflare tunnel
  • Add an application, making sure you follow these specific steps
    At this point you can actually login to SSH in the browser, but you will need to authenticate yourself
  • Configure a short lived certificate to allow automatic login to SSH in the browser
    A word of warning, the SSO identity you use to authenticate with Cloudflare access will be the username passed to your server, read this section to understand this

The possibilities are endless once you get your head around this. You could protect a WordPress admin login page (though automatic login to WordPress is not something I’ve explored yet). Grant secure access to a server running in another location, and as discussed here, actually login to SSH in the browser.

With this done (Zero Trust SSH) you can go ahead and close port 22 of your server. How much safer do you feel?

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