New clients often ask if I do hosting. The answer is always yes.

I have a server which is managed by many people in many companies and as great as this may sound, I do not sell hosting on a mass scale in the same way a lot of companies do. My business is to help clients develop their businesses and provide solutions and if hosting is not a part of such a solution then I’m not going to try and sell it.

I have a specific server design which works for most of my clients and especially for those who are starting up in developing their business on the web. With years of requests and requirements the server now seems to have most of the “stuff” on it required to run and manage most types of websites and the software that makes them function.

I can also help develop customised hosting / web servers for highly technical and specific requirements.

Just trying to get your attention !

And now that I have, I would like to tell you about something….

I was getting problems with users spamming TheInterPost (online advertising & sales) with Adverts and once the spamming was noticed I used their I.P Address to ban them from using the site.

Well… that’s what I thought… I was actually using their proxy address. For those of you who do not know what a proxy address is, here goes: a server relaying to a user’s machine which works between the the Internet and the user’s machine. It can perform various functions such as caching web pages to speed up browsing, protecting you with a firewall to stop uninvited incoming traffic, etc. ISPs tend to use proxy servers for these purposes and often to help resolve browsing problems when some users cannot access websites.

Anyway, back to my issue. I found out that I was banning whole sets of users as the proxy address was obviously shared by the users(who were spamming) and all the other users using the same ISP’s proxy as the spammer… Whoops!

So I updated the code on TheInterPost to attempt to detect a proxy and if there was one to differentiate between it and the actual IP address of the user.

This might sound all technical, but it’s useful for this sort of security/management issue and so is the other information that you can capture about users. What you do with this information is up to you but on a positive note and for users who use the web with consideration, I.P. addresses an other technical user information often helps in enhancing the user’s browsing experience.