We’re always looking to reduce spam here at 3DPixel.net. In doing so we come across interesting statistics that we like to share with you, if you are so inclined of course.

Where Does All Our Spam Come From? shows a list of countries, and the corresponding count of IPs (Eurovision style listing) that we have now proactively blocked once they pass the ‘5 spams per IP’ threshold that we set internally. The spam that we receive from these IPs must be sufficiently high that we can say with all confidence ‘this is spam’. We add the 5-time threshold simply for completeness.

We update this list every 20 mins from the live Trap25 / Spamgate systems.

Proactively blocking repeat spammers reduces overall network load on the Spamgate servers, meaning we can get email to you quicker.

Why oh why oh why do websites waste potential traffic? We’ve seen so many sites that either not understand, or plainly disregard either the www. or non-www. records of their websites.

The example that has just sprung to mind is the Trafford Centre in Manchester. The www. record works but the non-www. record does not. Why? I for one when typing an address in the browser, hardly ever use www. as it’s frankly an extra 4 characters I don’t want to type again and again.

Take 3dpixel.net for example, we have www. set up as a CNAME (DNS name to name alias) of the main A record so that they both point to the same website.

Duplicate content penalty from google? No problem! Use mod_rewrite to force it to the prefix of choice. Whichever one you want it does not matter as long as it’s ONE of them only.

In .haccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.3dpixel\.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://3dpixel.net/$1 [R=301,L]

So instead of presenting your potential visitors with a nasty 404 error. Why not get those visitors to your site. 100% free!

Something we’ve been playing with for a while… global gzip / deflate compression on apache servers. Naturally you can do this in php or via .htaccess but why not do it globally from the apache configuration?

Decided to give it a whirl on some of our own dedicated servers the other day.

Dowsides:

• Increases CPU load
• Increases CPU load
• Increases CPU load

Obviously there is only one major downside. The server has to compress the page on request and this takes processor power to do.

Upsides:

• Reduces bandwidth
• Increases client perceived responsiveness due to reduced page side

edit the main httpd.conf /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf for us:

#Alans gzip optimisations
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-php
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

Obviously you need to have the mod_deflate DSO added to apache (default configurations from RedHat / CentOS have this). It’s also advatageous to note what you want compressing – it’s not worth compressing zip files for example or binary files as you are simply wasting CPU power.

Success! We’ve since enabled this on our shared platforms as we are not currently CPU limited.