Unfortunately, this week saw a hard drive failure. At this time the main drive located on our main server had multiple failures ending in the corruption of the main drive. We have now finished reinstalling the OS and have restored data from backups on the second hard drive which are just 24 hours old. This just goes to show, even in the event of a worst-case-scenario, HostedFX has come through with a recent backup for all of its clients.

We are currently carrying out the upgrade to cPanel 11. If anyone is having any trouble accessing cPanel, all you have to do is simply submit a support ticket and the matter will be resolved.

So there you have it – hard drive failure when I was away. And the result? HostedFX restores everyone’s data within 24 hours and will be pushing on to greater heights with a fantastic new brand image in the near future. Customers can expect the same level of service that HostedFX has provided for nearly 2 years now.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused, but this was completely unexpected. I believe the unfortunate situation that occurred was handled in the best possible way by HostedFX.

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

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

We have been constantly monitoring the apache status of the server and could find that there is contact attack and heavy apache access from many IPs. The main problem is that the access IPs keep on changing. Due to this, we are now configuring our Brute Force Detection software in order to prevent any further attacks. Furthermore we have enabled Mod_Dosevasive in order to prevent this.

We thank you for your patience during this time, be assured that we at HostedFX are determined to deliver the best service to our customers at all times. We will always do everything within our power to ensure maximum performance and reliability.