FMP in depth - technical details

FMP operates server, hosted by Linode, LLC, a reliable cloud hosting service from their data center in Dallas, Texas. Linode provides a 100% uptime guarantee with redundant connections to the Internet, insuring that your website or other Internet resource at FMP will be available to you and your customers 24 by 7.

FMP's server runs the Linux operating system based on the Ubuntu server distribution of Linux

Web service for both servers is provided by by Apache, version 2.4.18. Active Server technology is provided by PHP version 7.0.33. Database service is provided by MySQL version 5.7.29.

All websites are supplied with SSL certificates at no additional cost from Let's Encrypt, which are trusted by all modern browsers.

· PHP7

PHP provides a complete programming API to website developers for generation of dynamic HTML content. The features of PHP are too numerous to list here, but include dynamic image creation, HTTP authentication, file upload support, HTTP cookie support, database support, easy forms processing, and much more. PHP is seamlessly integraged into the Apache web server and provides all the hooks for accessing data from databases managed by the MySQL server. A great deal more information on PHP is available on the PHP website FMP makes a number of 3rd party libraries and several custom extensions available to programmers who wish to develop their own PHP applications on FMP's servers. For security, FMP offers FPM (FastCGI Process Management) for customers using content and presentation management systems such as WordPress.

· MySQL

MySQL is a powerful multi-user, multi-threaded SQL database client/server system. MySQL implements a substantial subset of ANSI SQL and is fully supported in the PHP scripting language. FMP's web server acts as a MySQL client for PHP-enabled pages which need database support. Any web page content which can be stored in a database (products and their prices, names and addresses, etc.) can be served using PHP and MySQL. MySQL is the most popular database server for use with PHP active server technology. See the MySQL website for more information.

Mail service is provided by Sam Varshavchik's excellent Courier mail server. Spam is filtered from incoming email at two different points. Incoming email is accepted or rejected 'at the front door' using a selection of advisory 'black hole' lists of known sources of spam. Once email has been accepted by the mail server, it is analyzed on a per-account basis by SpamAssassin and inspected for viruses by ClamAV. Mail identified as spam or found to contain a known virus is segregated for your further analysis. Customers may set up and manage their own mailboxes and mail redirections using a password-protected website. Spam and virus filtering may be selectively disabled for any mailbox.

About 80% of incoming spam is detected and refused by FMP's mail server using a set of 6 advisory blacklists of known spam sources. This method occasionally results in false positives - rejection of legitimate email misidentified as spam - and can be disabled on a per-mailbox basis using FMP's customer mail management web user interface. Alternatively, on request, spam blocking can be turned off for an entire domain name.

For customers needing to transfer email securely over the public internet, FMP provides a secure email connection using Secure Sockets. This option is most useful for FMP's commercial customers needing to collect sensitive information such as credit card numbers from their customers, but is available for anyone, for any mailbox, by properly configuring a local mail client. See "Using Secure Email at FMP" for details on how to set up several popular email programs to use secure email transfers.

The default maximum message size for the Courier mail server is 10 megabytes. If you anticipate receiving email messages larger than this from correspondents using mail servers with fixed IP addresses, this limit can be set to a larger value on a per IP address (inbound) basis, depending on the soruce and the desired limit. Please call for more information. Keep in mind that binary attachments are re-written for transmission through the Internet mail system, enlarging them about 25%.

FMP's mailing list services are provided by Mailman. Mailman is an industry-standard list server widely used on the Internet for managing mailing lists. Mailman provides extensive and powerful Web-based list and subscriber management interfaces for both list administrators and indivudual subscribers, and its flexibility and ease of use are its most attractive features. A demo website is available on FMP. Call or email for details.

Backups of our servers, including customer websites, stored email, database data, mailing list archives, etc. are made weekly to a hard drive at FMP's office.