(FAYETTEVILLE, N.C.) - May 20, 2004 -- Ask any online business about the biggest hassle facing the Internet economy, and you’ll hear a near unanimous answer: spam. What started as an annoyance is becoming an unwelcome cost of business as the daily flood of unwanted e-mail chokes network and hardware resources, and the ritual of deleting spam steals employee time. AIT has developed an anti-spam service to reduce the aggravation(http://www.ait.com/antispamservice.php ). “This goes beyond removing clutter from someone’s inbox; spammers have evolved to embedding viruses and applications to exploit computer systems,” said Clarence Briggs, Chief Executive Officer at AIT. “Spam has become more than enhancement products or get-rich-quick schemes anymore; it’s now an encroachment on a company’s ability to do business.”
The AIT anti-spam service “learns” as the user tells it what type mail he or she no longer wants to receive. It then starts looking for certain keywords, their frequency, and the context in which phrases are used to filter out unwanted mail. With no additional client hardware or software required, the services ties in to existing AIT hosting accounts. “The challenge is balancing speed with security,” said AIT’s Chief Information Officer Burtland Jones. “The deeper the inspection of packets, the more resources that are utilized, and the longer the process takes. Of course, the time involved is far less than people spend clearing out their mailboxes.”
The server-side solution is IP specific, which benefits AIT’s resellers in giving them another product to market with virtually no overhead. Combined with the hosting company’s existing technology, and secure applications that filter and scan e-mail, the anti-spam service is engineered for any size business. “Spam is only going to become more prevalent, in part because successful direct e-mail campaigns have bred dozens of imitators,” said Briggs. “The increased rate of growth means businesses will face an increased threat of wasted time and abused resources.”
AIT has also added FreeBSD to its operating system options for dedicated hosting. FreeBSD is a favored choice of Unix developers for its stability. “Our focus on dedicated hosting this year has centered on giving customers options on just about everything, and the addition of FreeBSD is one more step in that regard,” said Kirk deViere, AIT’s Chief Operating Officer.
Founded in 1996 in North Carolina, AIT, Inc. provides web hosting and e-commerce services to more than 190,000 domains in 107 countries. AIT is the only hosting company listed on both the Inc 500 and Deloitte & Touche Fast 500. AIT also offers data storage, software development, IP telephony, security services, application hosting, and a technical education center. The company has a 25,000 square foot data center and provides live, 24/7 toll-free technical and billing support.
Contact: Alex Lekas
910-321-1247
