Customer Success Story

eROI Inc.

• Industry: Internet & e-commerce
• Products: VShell® for UNIX
• Company Size: less than 25
• Summary: This e-commerce and web hosting company uses VShell for UNIX to provide its clients with SFTP-only access to their web sites.

Organization

eROI, Inc. helps its clients get more bang for their buck by generating and capturing qualified leads online. eROI's services include e-mail marketing, e-commerce, search engine marketing, and web site development, as well as e-mail marketing campaign management and a powerful e-commerce engine and event registration platform.

Challenge

In addition to its e-commerce and web development services, eROI provides its clients with reliable, high-bandwidth web site hosting. Initially, eROI's customers were able to make changes to their hosted web sites using standard FTP and any one of a number of FTP clients.

"With our hosting environment, we wanted to give clients the ability to get to their web site via SFTP only—and your stuff works great for that.. I watch out for one port and turn off all the other services" —Brad Stec, System Architect and Developer, eROI

With increasing concerns about nonsecure protocols, eROI decided to turn off FTP and redesign its hosting environment. "We wanted to give our customers a way to update their web sites without having to worry about security," said Josh Ellison, a systems administrator at eROI.

The first thing that eROI did was turn off all nonsecure protocols. The next decision was how to give their client's access yet still contain them, ensuring the security of all customers. "We could have shelled FTP," said Brad Stec, eROI's system architect and developer. "But that's a traditional hacker "drive-through window". It's just too easy to find exploits. We also thought of just jail shelling them, but a hacker could figure out a way to exploit this," said Stec.

Solution

After considering other alternatives, including a custom shell operation, eROI selected VShell server for UNIX. The "RestrictSFTPtoHome" feature in VShell for UNIX was a major selling point for Stec. "I had your product during alpha testing," said Stec. "I said, 'this is what I need' and you guys invented it."

Using VShell for UNIX saved eROI significant development time that would have been spent on creating, maintaining, and supporting a custom shell operation. "You can set up this kind of environment using patches and scripts with Linux and OpenSSH, but users can break out of something like that," said Stec. "With our hosting environment, we wanted to give clients the ability to get to their web site via SFTP only—and your stuff works great for that. We have two to three admin accounts that have shell access and that's it. It's tighter that way. I watch out for one port and turn off all the other services," said Stec.

Setting up new client accounts with SFTP-only access is now a simple, standardized procedure with VShell. "It's just a config switch to create a new client account," said Stec. "With a custom jail shell, you'd have to add the user, load binaries manually—this can be automated, but it's not truly secure. If eROI did a custom solution and got hacked, we might not know it. And if we did know it, we might not know how or where the vulnerability is. I like only having one port open with one vendor [VanDyke] to stay on top of vulnerabilities. It simplifies my life and keeps our site more secure."

Stec also likes to see responsiveness when working with a vendor's customer support staff. "I'd suggest that I needed some kind of functionality and, within a few weeks, you guys would produce palpable results," said Stec. "You always improve your products in useful ways. I can actually use every enhancement you put into it."

An unanticipated and fortuitous benefit of using VShell for UNIX was its scalability. eROI quickly outgrew their initial VShell Workgroup Edition server setup and needed to upgrade to VShell Enterprise Edition. "It was easy for us to upgrade for a few hundred dollars to Enterprise servers," said Stec.

With the VShell solution in place, eROI's clients can now easily access and update their hosted web sites using any number of free Secure Shell clients or VanDyke's SecureFX® file transfer client—without worrying about security.

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