cPanel 11 Stable Release Schedule

As some of you may or may not know, we here at HostedFX are eagerly awaiting the stable release of cPanel 11. The latest version of cPanel is going to bring a lot of great new features as well as better security and functionality.

All things being well, we should be looking at around early August for the stable upgrade to cPanel 11

MySQL Issue

Over the last 24 hours we have been testing the newest version of cPanel – cPanel 11. During this time we found a number of bugs, and security problems, not to mention the 505 errors displayed across the server. We have reported our findings to cPanel themselves, and await a response. Due to this we have delayed our upgrade until cPanel fixes all known bugs.

This time of testing has essentially only been carried out in order to improve your experience as a customer and we thank you for your patience during this time. You may view the new features that will be available when we do upgrade to a stable release of cPanel 11 here:
- http://www.cpanel.net/products/cPanelandWH…11/security.htm

We have now downgraded back to cPanel 10, and all should be working as normal. We had an unfortunate MySQL error which has now been resolved.

Once again, thank you for your patience,
Gareth

[Warning] TopSites

In the past week there have been issues on several servers which point back to TopSites installations. TopSites is a popular site ranking script which you may be familiar with.

The problem we see is that many different IPs (most are hijacked PCs located in Turkey, used as bot networks) are hammering these TopSites directories, acting as mini DoS attacks against those servers. The last security advisory for TopSites was last year, but apparently it remains unpatched. This does not give us much faith in the developers – it could have been fixed a long time ago, then we would not be dealing with this problem now.

The bottomline is that we are forced to disable the affected directories as we find them. We do recommend replacing this script with a similar one. We are likely disabling TopSites in all Fantastico panels.

Automation Features of New Client Area

With the new client area brings something I have wanted for a long time – automation! In this post I will briefly outline the automated processed carried out automatically by the client area. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment – HostedFX will always listen.

Account Creation/Suspension/Termination
- New accounts will be automatically created, and the details emailed to you, after the first payment is due.
- Accounts will be automatically suspended after a payment is 2 days overdue.
- Suspended accounts will be automatically unsuspended the second an overdue invoice is paid.
- Accounts will be automatically terminated 90 days after the last payment was received.

Billing
- Invoices will be generated 7 days before the payment is sent.
- A reminder will be sent 1 day before the payment is due, if it has not been paid.
- An invoice ‘overdue message’ will be sent if payment reaches 1 day late.

That’s basically it. If you don’t agree with anything, please let me know

[MUST-READ] It’s Good To See You

Well, what a 24 hours it has been.To be honest, I don’t know where to begin but I’ll give it my best try.

The Explanation
Firstly, we had a huge network attack where basically every dedicated server at our datacenter went down. This was the result of a DDOS attack on the datacenter’s network. We later found out that there was literally thousands of IP’s flooding the network and therefore clogging up apache, meaning that none of the sites on our server would load. The ironic thing about this is that our server has not been down once during the attacks – the load has been perfectly fine.

However, our apache was clogged due to the persistent connections which prevented other websites from loading on our server. I’d like to give a special thanks to one of our clients, Make, who was a fantastic aid in isolating and fixing the problem with the IP flooding.

As you all know, this is a first outage of this kind for HostedFX, and hopefully a last. This is a rare occurance for the datacenter, who have assured me that they will put in place measures to avoid future repeats of this incident. I can only thank you for your loyalty during this time as this is something that was out of our control.

The Reward
All of our packages have just recieved double the amount of bandwidth. Even though this incident was not under our influence, I can completely understand your frustration and therefore see this as ‘payback’, if you will. All accounts now have the following amounts of bandwidth, dependant upon your package:

- Bronze: 60GB  - Silver: 120GB – Gold: 180GB

Once again, I can only thank you for your loyalty and patience during this tough time. Now we look to push forward together, with many upgrades and additional features planned for HostedFX.

Kindest and warmest regards,
Gareth Hodson