Can you give us a brief overview of Astral Internet as a company?
Astral Internet was built from the ground up from the dream of its owner, Martin Blanchette. He wanted to have a hosting company that would treat clients the same way we want to be treated. Almost everyone I know has had at least one bad experience with online services. These range from poor customer support—where you can easily spend an hour on hold, being transferred from one department to another without ever resolving your issue—to unexpected charges for items that were initially advertised as included. This was the first building block of Astral Internet: offering exceptional service and always aiming higher than client expectations. Before joining Astral Internet, I spent over 15 years working in four- and five-star hotels such as Marriott and InterContinental. Today, all my hospitality experience is applied to training our technicians, ensuring we truly provide a five-star service. Of course, outstanding service is not the only advantage we offer our clients! Over the years, we have built our own cloud infrastructure instead of relying on third-party solutions. This gives us 100% control over every aspect of our environment, allowing us to maximize performance down to the last gigahertz for end-user servers and websites.What benefits and features do your email hosting services include?
We took a different approach to email hosting services. Many hosting providers either rely on Microsoft Exchange or Google to offer professional email services to their clients, while others include built-in email solutions directly within control panels like cPanel, Plesk, or similar platforms. While Google and Microsoft provide robust professional email solutions, costs can quickly escalate when multiple addresses are required. On the other hand, built-in email solutions in popular control panels often lack advanced functionality. Our approach is based on SmarterMail by SmarterTools. This solution allows us to offer many features typically found only in Exchange servers, thanks to MAPI and EAS email protocols. Our clients can now share calendars, contacts, and files across accounts. Additionally, the web interface includes a built-in video conferencing tool, enabling users to create private meetings for internal teams or public sessions with external clients. Instead of charging per email address, we’ve chosen to bill based on storage usage. This means clients only pay for the storage they need, regardless of how many email addresses they have. Given the current exchange rate, we charge $6 CAD per 10GB of storage, meaning a small business (PME) could easily maintain 10 email addresses for around $4.13 USD per month—a cost-effective alternative to traditional solutions.How can you help your clients boost their cPanel sites through cache management?
Over the years, we’ve tested numerous solutions promising fast website speeds, from the open-source Engintron to cPanel’s LiteSpeed Web Server. However, every solution we tried came with challenges. Some had compatibility issues, making many websites inaccessible, while others offered limited configuration options, making them unsuitable for shared hosting environments. In 2018, we decided to build our own solution from the ground up. The project had two main objectives:- Develop a solution that could be installed on any cPanel server without causing website downtime.
- Provide an easy-to-use interface for advanced configurations—accessible not only to our clients but also to our competitors.
- I update my site once a month.
- I update my site once a day.
- I have an online store.
- Etc.
Can you elaborate on the security aspect of Nginx’s “Rate Limiting”?
Of course! The rate limiting feature in Nginx helps mitigate DoS attacks. The principle behind rate limiting is quite simple to understand. First, you need to configure some settings. The main piece of information required is: What is the maximum number of requests an IP address can make within a given time frame? Once these values are defined, Nginx will track each request from a particular IP address. If the number of requests exceeds the defined threshold, Nginx will block the request. Of course, there are additional directives you can configure, such as “burst” or “burst delay”, which help prevent legitimate traffic from being blocked. However, a full deep dive into Nginx rate limiting would be a topic on its own! One major advantage of rate limiting—especially when using Nginx as a reverse proxy in front of multiple websites—is its ability to detect if an IP address is scanning all the sites on a server for vulnerabilities. This allows Nginx to quickly block malicious IPs. At Astral Internet, we integrated Nginx rate limiting directly into our Website Speed Accelerator (WSA) within the WHM interface, allowing administrators to easily fine-tune performance and security settings. Important note: While rate limiting is a great security feature in Nginx, it should never be relied upon as the only security measure. Comprehensive server security involves multiple layers of protection!What other services and features do you offer?
We offer everything you would expect from a web hosting provider. Hosting Services: First off, we provide standard hosting packages based on cPanel, supporting PHP (WordPress), MySQL, Python, Node.js, and more. Secondly, we also offer ASP.NET Core and classic .NET hosting with MS SQL. A few years ago, many hosting providers supported Windows Server hosting, but over time, many have dropped support for it. However, since we have a significant number of clients using the DNN framework (DotNetNuke) and an increasing number adopting .NET Core, we believe it’s important to continue offering this service—despite the additional expertise required for server maintenance. WordPress Hosting – WordPress 360: Nowadays, it’s impossible to talk about hosting services without mentioning WordPress! We provide a specialized hosting package called WordPress 360, which includes: hosting on an optimized server, regular updates, and website performance optimization. One major difference between WordPress 360 and other similar services is that we do not rely on automated scripts for maintenance. We tested many automated WordPress maintenance services, but each time, the results were not as reliable as when handled manually. Instead, a qualified technician personally secures, updates, and optimizes each website. After completing these tasks, they compare the before and after versions to ensure no functionality is broken. This process is repeated at least once or twice a month for every WordPress 360 site under our management. Virtual Servers (VPS): We also offer a full range of virtual servers, available on Linux (with the client’s choice of distribution) or Windows. These servers can be:- Unmanaged – Ideal for custom setups, such as running a Docker environment or a DMS like CKAN
- Managed – A balanced option with essential maintenance
- Fully Managed – Comes preinstalled with a control panel like cPanel or Plesk for ease of use
To learn more about Astral Internet, you can visit www.astralinternet.com
