Email is today still an irreplaceable communication channel for businesses and individuals alike. So much that if you fail to receive an important email on time, you may risk missing critical business opportunities.

Here is where the ‘Push Email’ functionality for the IMAP protocol kicks in.

What is IMAP IDLE?

IMAP IDLE is a simple, yet very effective protocol for keeping you notified for incoming email messages the moment they are sent to you.

Normally, if IMAP IDLE is not enabled on the server, an email client will have to constantly connect to the server to check for new messages. This connection will be refreshed by the email client at regular intervals, leading to consumption of considerable amounts of Internet traffic.

While this would not be an issue for a desktop user, a mobile user will see the difference in his monthly mobile data usage bill.

With IMAP IDLE enabled for the IMAP protocol, the mail client on your device will keep a persistent connection with the server and considerably less traffic (several bytes a day) will be consumed in the process.

How does ‘Push Email’ for IMAP work?

With an active connection maintained between the sending mail server and the mail client on your device, you will be notified of new inbound messages immediately.

The ‘Push Email’ functionality is supported by almost all Operating Systems and email clients and it is enabled by default on all our web hosting servers, so you do not need to do anything on your end to set email pushing in action; if you are not interested in this option though, you can turn it off from your email client.

Kind Regards,
Support team

We are pleased to announce the addition of another data centre option to the list of facilities on the web hosting order form.

From today, you will be able to request your sites to be located in one of the most popular data centre locations in Eastern Europe.

The Telepoint data centre is located in the heart of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, a country that has one of the fastest-developing IT labour markets in Europe. Many foreign companies like Hewlett-Packard, SAP Labs and Johnson Controls have successfully expanded their businesses in Bulgaria and many more will.

The Telepoint data centre is a carrier-neutral Tier 3+ facility, which is situated at a crossroad of many local and international telecom networks.

The great connectivity conditions make the facility a great choice for websites located within the region of Eastern Europe, including countries like Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, Romania, Ukraine, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, etc.

The facility offers 24/7 onsite customer support and system monitoring. To ensure complete protection of the stored sensitive information, Telepoint applies a number of physical access control measures. There are engineers and armed guards who are on duty 24/7. All the areas are under constant surveillance.

The full redundancy, the quality control and the information security systems allow for a 99.999% service uptime.

The Telepoint data centre operates up to the highest standards for storage, management and dissemination of data and information. It has an ISO:9001 Quality Management System certification and an ISO:27001 Information Security System certification.

For a list of the international carriers that the Telepoint data centre collaborates with to ensure optimum loading speeds for customers all over Eastern Europe, please click the following link: https://www.telepoint.bg/en/carriers

For now, the Telepoint data centre is available as an option only with the cloud web hosting services:

We are planning to add it to the list of data centre options for our Virtual Private Servers too. Stay tuned!

Kind Regards,
Support team

Gone are the days when the web was seen as a way to socialize the world and turn it into a global village. Today, the emphasis is placed on the local content, i.e. on the particular location and needs of the citizen of that global village.

Gradually, the marketing focus of businesses has shifted from reaching the mass audiences to reaching the right audience and hence boosting conversions.

Visitors location is a top priority for Google, which serves its search results based on their browser’s whereabouts. And online advertising services do the same because it allows businesses to reach the right customers and maximize the conversion rates.

Geo targeting for delivering local content

The technology that lies behind that localization is called geo-targeting. It allows identification of the visitor’s geographic location according to their IP address and serves them content that is specific to that location.

For example, Juniper, one of the producer of network switches that we use, has a few language and content versions of its site.

• Here is how the site loads to a visitor in the USA:

• And this is how the site will look like if you are loading it from Germany:

You can set up your website to load content based on the browser's location by using various techniques such as .htaccess file-triggered redirects or PHP code. Next there are two links to PHP-based geo-targeting code offered by MaxMind (they open in a new window / tab):

• Example code: https://github.com/maxmind/geoip-api-php/blob/master/examples/country.php
• IP geolocation database: https://www.maxmind.com/en/opensource

Geo-targeting for maximum loading speeds

Geo-targeting can also be used for boosting the loading speeds of your sites by resolving from the data centre that is closest to the visitor. As we know, the closer a website is located to your visitors, the faster it will display your content in their browsers.

By setting up DNS-based geo-targeting, your site will detect your visitors’ location automatically and then deliver your content fastly and localised for them.

How do I use geo-targeting for my site?

Here is how you can set up DNS-based geo-targeting using the GeoIP API functionality in your Web Hosting Control Panel (opens in a new window).

Firstly,  find out which are the main geographic target markets for your website. Let’s say that your site is targeted at users from the UK and Australia and you want them both to load your site on their devices equally fastly.

Then, you will need to replicate your site between two data centers – one in the UK and one in Australia. All you have to do is set up two hosting accounts – one in the UK and one in Australia, and host two exact copies of your site under these accounts.

In the Custom DNS Records section, click on the Create a DNS record button on the top right.

From the pop-up window, select the type of DNS record that you want to set. In our example, this would be an A record. You could also set GeoIP targeting with an AAAA and a CNAME record.

Then fill in the IP address of the server:

Next, mark the Enable GeoIP checkbox. This will open a long list of location options allowing you to narrow down your targeting by Continent, Country, State and even City!:

When done, click on the Add button to create the A record with enabled GeoIP targeting.

Next, you will need to do the same for your UK-based site in the respective hosting account.

Also, you will also have to set up another non-GeoIP-enabled A record in one of the two accounts, so that your site will load its default content to visitors outside of the geographic range that you have specified using the geo-targeting functionality.

All in all, geo-targeting is a great new way to add flexibility to your site’s performance and to reach your customers as fast as possible wherever they are located, serving them the content they want to see.

Kind Regards,
Support team

Dear Customers,

You may have heard that a flaw recently discovered in the motherboards manufactured by Supermicro has left more than 30,000 servers vulnerable to hackers who could easily identify exploitable servers and download login passwords in clear plain text.

Also, there is another vulnerability that has been noticed around this issue - that most of the hosting systems are running older versions of the Linux kernel.

We use Supermicro motherboards too. That is why our admins took timely measures to apply the necessary security patches based on the new firmware update provided by Supermicro. Oh, and did we mention that we are keeping our Linux kernel up to date always? Well, yes we do!

Kind Regards,
Support team