Lounge Network - Latest News

Emergency SAN storage Maintenance Tonight (22/05/2013)

Wed, 22 May 2013 05:34:39 +0000

The datacentre are carrying out Emergency SAN storage Maintenance between the hours of 00:00 and 03:00 on 23/05/2013.

Impact: During this time, there is likely to be a period of up to 10 minutes where you will experience poor performance.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused, and thank you for your understanding.

Urgent Maintenance: Parts Replacement on Storage Array on Albany Network

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:20:10 +0000

Following the outage on Wednesday on the Albany Network, urgent maintenance is being carried out on the affected Storage Array, while the datacentre techs replace certain components marked as faulty between 12am and 6am on 17/05/2013 (overnight tonight). This will allow the network to restore full redundancy.

Impact:

Due to the redundant nature of the networks SAN, our providers do not expect any service unavailability during this time. Volumes currently active on the problematic controller will be failed over to the other controller, to help further mitigate against a possible impact.

As a precaution the datacentre have scheduled it for the early hours of the morning and they will have multiple engineers on standby in case of any unforeseen issues.

Scheduled Maintenance: PHP 5.3 session change and resource move, on the Albany Server Cluster

Tue, 14 May 2013 03:41:07 +0000

Time: Tomorrow, Wednesday 15th of May 2013 at 6 AM

Impact: PHP 5.3 Sessions will be reset

The server technicians are going to change the method that sessions are stored with. This will help improve performance and stability for the PHP 5.3 cluster service.

At the same time, they will be rebalancing load over the NAS servers that service the PHP clusters. This will be non-service impacting

New PHP 5.3 servers to be added

Tue, 7 May 2013 01:39:43 +0000

There will be a new PHP 5.3 server added to the Auckland server cluster this Wednesday at 9 AM. The new server is a complete rebuild of our PHP 5.3 standard, so we will only send it a small subset of the requests initially to ensure it performs as expected. If you notice any intermittent problems with the PHP 5.3 service on Wednesday please let us know and we'll investigate ASAP.

If the server works as expected we will give it a full workload on Thursday from 9 AM. We will also add additional PHP 5.3 servers using the same new build the same day.

Please note that quote a lot of maintance is planned for the PHP 5.3 network to improve and grow the network, which in the end should result in superior performance. This includes software updates and hardware to be added

New Control Panel Environment

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 04:21:09 +0000

We have moved our Control Panel for our Premium Unmetered Plans to a new environment at http://controlpanel.secureserver.co.nz

Global WordPress Brute Force Attack

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 02:12:27 +0000

There is currently an on-going and highly-distributed global attack on WordPress installations across virtually every web hosting provider in the world. This has been going on for several days. Symptoms of the problem include slow website loading, or failing to load altogether, as the attack causes very high server loads.

Change to PHP 5.3 session handling on Albany Network

Tue, 9 Apr 2013 05:57:26 +0000

Our providers will change the PHP 5.3 cluster's session handler to the default tomorrow morning. This is being put through with urgency as there have been intermittent issues with the current setup.

Scheduled Maintenance: Shared Mail Platform

Tue, 9 Apr 2013 04:28:56 +0000

Our providers are carrying out maintenance on the Premium Unmetered Shared Mail platform on 11/04/2013 between the hours of 10:00pm and 11:00pm.

Minor Email Issue for some clients

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:10:40 +0000

Time: 09:00 until 09:05

There was a brief email authentication issue in our email cluster which impacted some customers on our Unmetered hosting plans hosted in the Maxnet datacentre. This problem is now resolved and this RSS is just to acknowledge the issue.

Major Website Updates Coming

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:07:17 +0000

We are making some major changes to our website over the next few weeks, along with a brand new fresh website and design.

Automatic iOS Configuration for email / calendar / contacts, is now available for iPhone / iPad / iPod devices.

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 04:27:05 +0000

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class Web Hosting plans.

We are pleased to announce that Automatic iOS Configuration for email / calendar / contacts, is now available for iPhone / iPad / iPod devices.
People wanting to set this up should navigate to the following URL from their iOS Device

https://webmail.webhost.co.nz/index.php/mail

Information on how to set this up can be found at http://www.loungenetwork.co.nz/faqman/index.php?op=view&t=385

Increase in Spam from Telecom / Xtra / Yahoo email accounts

Sat, 9 Feb 2013 10:06:53 +0000

There has been a noticeable increase in spam being received from Telecom NZ email addresses. These include email accounts ending in @xtra.co.nz , yahoo.co.nz etc, and usually includes a link to malware. We suggest deleting these emails immediately, and do not click on any links in the email. Should you click on the email, make sure you do a full malware scan on your PC, as it could potentially cause a compromise on your hosting and email accounts.

This is not something that is affecting our services, but a general problem that is currently occurring on the Internet at the moment. Apparently Telecom are currently investigating the problem.

Therefore if you are receiving a lot of spam from email addresses ending in @xtra.co.nz, or @yahoo.co.nz, this will be the reason, and please delete them. Please contact Telecom for more information by googling 'telecom nz'.

New web server and new MySQL 5.5 database cluster

Thu, 7 Feb 2013 10:40:13 +0000

This message applies only to clients on our Unmetered Corporate and Business Class Hosting Plans.

On Monday the 11th of February we will add a new web server to the PHP 5.3 cluster bringing the total to 4. We will also add support for a third MySQL cluster to the Control Panel. The new cluster runs MySQL 5.5. The changes will be introduced from 9AM.

We do not anticipate any problems during the introduction of the servers.

CPanel server hardware upgrades.

Sat, 2 Feb 2013 04:05:16 +0000

We are pleased to announce that all our CPanel servers have had their hardware upgraded over recent months, as part of our regular updating schedule. This will allow the reliability and performance of the servers to remain at their very high levels. The continued reliability of our services is very important to us, and we are pleased to be one of the most reliable and longest established hosting providers in New Zealand, now being in our 12th year of business.

Atmail Webmail Upgrades for the 01/02/2013

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 05:06:24 +0000

This announcement applies to clients on our Corporate and Business class hosting plans.
We are pleased to announce that we have scheduled the installation of the latest Atmail software on Friday, 01/02/2013. This is a major release update containing:

-New Atmail 7 theme
-Faster performance for big mailboxes
-Tons of improvements and fixes

Seasons Greetings for 2012/2013

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 06:50:20 +0000

As 2012 draws to a close we would like to thank all of our clients for hosting their websites with us.

We've made some big changes in 2012, mainly to the backend systems. This includes updating most of our web hosting plans to give more value to clients. We have also updated most hosting control panels, and there have also been significant server and network upgrades, leading to hosting reliability that is even better than ever. We are proud to now have one of the most reliable hosting platforms operating in NZ.

2012 also saw us enter our 12th year in business, now making us one of NZ's longest established 100% NZ owned hosting providers. We would like to thank clients for continuing to support a 100% NZ owned company. Supporting a 100% NZ company means that all the profits we make, remain in NZ, and as a result, we pay our fair share of tax to support the NZ economy.

Our main office will be closed between the 22nd December until the 7th January. We will be offering limited support during this period. If you however need emergency support, please use the emergency support form (charges apply)

We would like to wish all our clients a safe and enjoyable holiday over the Christmas and New Year break.

Merry Christmas

Kind Regards

The Team @ Lounge Network.

Mail authentication issue on NZ Hosting Network

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 10:46:06 +0000

The shared mail platform is currently having an authentication problem. Attempts to download mail results in being prompted for a password. This has been fixed for approximately half the mailboxes. We expect the other half to start working again within the next hour. Email will continue to be received by mailboxes, it is solely affecting the ability to login. We apologise for the inconvenience.
--UPDATE-- This has now been resolved.

Reminder of New CPanel and Webmail Login URLs

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 02:49:16 +0000

This is just a repeat announcement to one we posted back on the 15/12/2011, regarding the new URLs for accessing Webmail & Cpanel. Most of our servers now have these new logins as mandatory, so if you are having trouble logging in or getting security error messages, please make sure you are using the new logins below.

This announcement ONLY applies to clients on our Premium Grade CPanel branded web hosting plans.

Due to security and server upgrades mentioned in a previous announcement, clients on our CPanel plans will soon only be able to login to CPanel & Webmail through a secure login page. Therefore the old login URL you used to use will be phased out in the coming weeks.

The new logins will depend on which server your website is installed on. Please check your Account information email that we initially sent you when the account was first setup, which should display the server you are on. If you don't have access to this, you can also try logging into to each server using trial and error, which will tell then you the server you are on.

The login links to both CPanel and Webmail can now be found on our updated login pages. The links to these pages can be found below.

CPANEL LOGIN

WEBMAIL LOGIN

URGENT MAINTENANCE - Shared Mail Platform

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 06:51:35 +0000

Urgent maintenance work will be undertaken on the Shared Mail Platform on all of our Unmetered Hosting plans, to ensure continued service availability.

Start Time: 18/11/2012 18:00 (6:00pm NZDT)

End Time: 18/11/2012 21:00 (9:00pm NZDT)

Telecom / Xtra Email problems - This is not affecting our services

Fri, 2 Nov 2012 05:38:16 +0000

As reported in the media, Telecom / Xtra have apparently again had problems with their email services. http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/7899456/Telecom-may-pay-for-email-outage
Please note that this problem with Telecom is not affecting our own email services in anyway. If you are a telecom customer who has been affected by this email problem and want to now switch providers, please contact us to learn how you can switch to our NZ hosted email system.

Our email only services are $18 +gst per month, which includes unlimited email storage and email accounts. Also email accounts can be setup with unlimited domains, if you transfer or register those domains into our system. Our email system also hosted in Auckland and offers POP, IMAP, SMTP connections as well as uses the commercial Atmail webmail system http://atmail.com/. Email is stored on dedicated email servers, so it is a commercial grade system hosted locally in NZ.

One advantage our system also has over many other systems, is that domain names and email accounts are all managed within the same unified control panel, so there is only a single log in, and the control panel has been developed in NZ.

If you are a telecom customer who has been affected by this email problem and want to now switch providers, please contact us to learn how you can switch to our NZ hosted email system.

As reported in the media Telecom have again had problems with their email services. [url=http://loungenetwork.co.nz/contact.php

Please update your website software.

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 02:30:16 +0000

We have noticed an increased number of clients who haven't been updating their website software, scripts and plugins, which has resulted in them either being hacked, or having malware injected into them. The most common ones which have been targeted are Wordpress and Joomla content management systems. Content management systems are great, as they allow people to easily and quickly update their websites, however they do require the software running in the back-end to be regularly updated. If you are running software on your website, please make sure you regularly update the scripts in your hosting space with the most recent software. It is the website owners responisbility to make sure their website scripts are up to date at all times. Not only will this help to keep your website safe and secure from hackers, it will reduce the work we need to do in dealing with an account that has been compromised. If we detect a problem on the server with a compromised hosting account, our immediate action is to suspend the clients account until the problem has been fixed to minimise problems for other users on the server, which results in downtime for the clients website and other services.

More information on updating your website scripts can be found at http://loungenetwork.co.nz/faqman/index.php?op=view&t=359

.KIWI.NZ DOMAINS ARE NOW LIVE!

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 01:46:02 +0000

.kiwi.nz domains are now available for registration at www.domains.loungenetwork.co.nz

New Extension .kiwi.nz to become available from 12pm on the 11th September

Fri, 7 Sep 2012 05:05:21 +0000

InternetNZ have provisionally approved a new second-level NZ domain, .kiwi.nz, and we will be processing provisional registrations from 12pm on the launch day of 11th September 2012. However you can a submit a request to us now, for us to provisionally register a .kiwi.nz domain for you, when we begin to process them from 12pm on the 11th September. Please read below for more information.

CPanel standard web hosting plans have been upgraded.

Fri, 7 Sep 2012 04:26:29 +0000

As part of our 12th Birthday Celebrations, we are pleased to announce that we have upgraded most of our Standard Web Hosting Plans. Most now include significantly more diskspace and bandwidth. Many have had their quotas DOUBLED.

Google Pagespeed Now added to our Unmetered hosting plans.

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 02:45:29 +0000

Google Pagespeed is now available to clients on our Unmetered Linux hosting plans. It is set to 'Off' by default.

To enable Google PageSpeed you simply need add the following to your sites .htaccess:

ModPagespeed on

You must be on our Unmetered Corporate or Business Linux plans for this to work.

For more information on Google Pagespeed, please visit https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

.kiwi.nz domains will be available from the 11 September 2012

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 02:42:27 +0000

.kiwi.nz domains will be available for registration through our Lounge Network Domain Manager from the afternoon of 11 September 2012. They can be registered from this date though our Domain Manager system at www.domains.loungenetwork.co.nz

Please note that there is a 500 domain threshold before their .kiwi.nz domains will be be delegated to DNS during the provisional registration phase. This basically means that .kiwi.nz domains wont work until they hit the 500 threshold. So if they don't reach that threshold, they won't be delegated. More info can be found at http://dnc.org.nz/story/internetnz-approves-new-second-level-domain-kiwinz

New .kiwi.nz domain extension approved

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 04:20:49 +0000

The .kiwi.nz domain has been approved by internet NZ, and will be available for pre registration from 10am on Tuesday, 11 September 2012. All going well it should be available to the general public shortly after this from inside our Domain Manager system at http://www.domains.loungenetwork.co.nz. However according to the media release, there is a 500 minimum registration threshold before they will be activated, so if that is not achieved, .kiwi.nz will not become active.

Media release from internet NZ below

InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) is pleased to announce that it has approved the creation of a new second level domain in the .nz domain name space - .kiwi.nz. This expands the range of choice New Zealanders have in the domain name market and means that people will soon be able to register personalised domain names ending in .kiwi.nz.

3rd nameserver added: ns3.nameserver.net.nz

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:34:13 +0000

We've added a third nameserver for users of our Corporate and Business Hosting plans, as well as our parked domains - ns3.nameserver.net.nz.

Any domains that already use both ns1.nameserver.net.nz and ns2.nameserver.net.nz set as the default nameserver setting, and are also registered with us, will automatically have their third name server set to ns3.nameserver.net.nz tomorrow morning (21/08/2012). If your domain is registered elsewhere you can add this new nameserver manually.

We do not expect any negative impact from this change, which adds redundancy.

Our Nameservers are as follows:
ns1.nameserver.net.nz 119.47.119.1
ns2.nameserver.net.nz 66.29.25.63
ns3.nameserver.net.nz 118.127.36.80

Windows Server Updates 12/07/2012

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 03:21:49 +0000

Details

We have scheduled Windows updates on most of our servers, starting at 10PM this coming Thursday night (12/07/2012) and completing on Friday (13/07/2012) morning at 4AM. We anticipate up to 60 minutes of downtime during this period and apologise for the inconvenience.

Lots of Updates to the CPanel servers...

Mon, 9 Jul 2012 04:47:35 +0000

We have made lots of updates to the CPanel servers recently.

You may have noticed that CPanel now looks a bit different when logging in, and this is because the software has had a major update.

We have also updated our website builder software, RV Site builder, to the newest version. This is now at version 5. RV site builder is a great way to setup a free website in your hosting account, with no web design knowledge required, as you build it in your web browser.

We have now also added the option for full DNS Zone File modifications from inside CPanel, using the 'Advance DNS Zone Editor'. So if you need to make those changes, you can now do this all yourself using the self service system.

MAJOR INCIDENT REPORT AT THE ORCON DATA CENTRE

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 04:05:09 +0000

Below is Orcons MIR for the unscheduled outage that occurred yesterday that knocked out our websites and also some of our clients. Please note that this was a Datacentre issue with our NZ providers Orcon.

WHEN DID IT START 25/06/2012 16:47

WHEN DID IT END 25/06/2012 18:33

SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE - CPanel Server upgrades - Server Reboots to kernel 3.3.X series

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 04:24:10 +0000

The data centre are going to be rebooting a group of servers over the next few days. Reboots are scheduled to start from 10 PM US pacific time on each day. The purpose of this reboots is to update the kernel running on each server to the latest stable one (3.3.x series) with security patches applied. The version of the kernel running on the servers are relatively old and needs to be updated. By rebooting the server to the latest updated kernel series, all servers will be more secure and free from kernel level vulnerabilities.

We expect these to go quite smoothly, with an average downtime of 5 mins each. There will be staff onsite in case of problems. Certain servers can enter into force filesystem check upon reboot and in that case, there maybe downtime close an hour depending upon the pace in which the filesystem check proceeds.

Windows Updates 14/06/2012

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 10:42:51 +0000

We have scheduled Windows updates on most of our servers, starting at 10PM this coming Thursday night (14/06/2012) and completing on Friday (15/06/2012) morning at 4AM. We anticipate up to 60 minutes of downtime during this period and apologise for the inconvenience.

Scheduled Maintenance: Webmail software patches

Thu, 17 May 2012 03:44:53 +0000

This announcement only applies to our Corporate and Business plan users

Our providers have scheduled the installation of the latest Atmail software patches todat after midnight. The patches are a major release update containing more than 100 fixes and improvements to the Atmail system.

Start Time: 18/05/2012 00:00 NZST
End Time: 18/05/2012 01:00 NZST

O.S Updates on the Shared Linux cluster

Thu, 17 May 2012 02:54:27 +0000

This announcement only applies to our Corporate and Business plan users

On Tuesday, 29th May our upstream providers will be upgrading our the Shared Linux cluster in order to keep it secure. The upgrade will be to the Operating System itself, and will not change the PHP version.

However, some underlying OS packages will be upgraded - for example 'imagemagick' - and it's possible this may affect some customer websites.

Telecom / Xtra Outgoing SMTP email issues

Tue, 8 May 2012 05:20:26 +0000

We have had a few clients contact us who have said that they are having trouble sending emails, and they are using Telecom / Xtras SMTP servers to send their domain based email. We believe this is a known problem with telecoms Yahoo service provider. If you are having trouble, please contact them about resolving this
Alternatively you can also use our SMTP servers to send out email, if your hosting plan supports it. Details on setting it up can be found at http://loungenetwork.co.nz/faqman/index.php?op=view&t=90

If you are not one of our clients, but are reading this because you are a Telecom / Xtra customer, and trying to find a solution to this problem, please contact us if you want to move your hosting to our servers. We do provide SMTP servers with most of our hosting plans, which allows you to bypass your ISP when it comes to sending emails. You can contact us at http://www.loungenetwork.co.nz/contact.php

Scheduled Maintenance: Shared Mail Platform 09/05/12

Wed, 2 May 2012 02:25:33 +0000

Our providers will be carrying out maintenance on the Shared Mail platform, at the Albany Datacentre, on 09/05/2012 between the hours of 12:00am and 2:00am. This only applies to clients on our Unmetered hosting plans, and not to clients on our CPanel plans.

New control panel for ourUnmetered NZ based hosting plans - Coming Soon!

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 04:47:29 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our providers are working flat out to create a new hosting Control Panel for our Unmetered web hosting plans. Once it is ready we will provide an update on this page.

Mail Platform problem causing mail retrieval issues - Auckland datacentre

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 02:59:12 +0000

There was a hardware issue at the Auckland datacentre between 11:30am and 12:30pm today which caused problems for some clients receiving email off the server. In some case it also caused problems sending emails. No emails were lost, as all email was queued on the server. This only affected those clients hosted at the Auckland datacentre on our Corporate and Business hosting No limits plans

This has now been resolved.

Hosting server upgrades on our No Limits Linux web hosting plans

Wed, 4 Apr 2012 06:41:49 +0000

As part of our Linux shared hosting upgrade project, we plan to split customer accounts over multiple storage servers. This will take place during the following maintenance window:

12/04/2012 12AM to 6AM

We do not anticipate any downtime or performance impact for your sites due to the migration. If you do notice problems with your sites on the morning of the migration, please contact us and we will investigate immediately.

Unable to receive emails at Albany datacentre - RESOLVED

Sun, 1 Apr 2012 03:58:15 +0000

THIS ISSUE HAS NOW BEEN RESOLVED

One of the storage servers in our shared mail cluster is having performance problems. This is resulting it delays in downloading mail via POP and IMAP for approximately 1/2 of the mailboxes. At this stage our providers suspect a failed disk is the problem. They are investigating further and we'll update this announcement when we have more information.

Renew your Domain Names before they expire...

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 06:02:51 +0000

We would just like to remind clients to always renew and pay for their domain names well before their scheduled expiry date.

Urgent software update for Linux shared hosting storage on Albany Network

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:05:27 +0000

The server techs plan to apply the latest software update to the primary storage device for Linux shared hosting during the following maintenance window:

Tomorrow morning 01/03/2012 12AM to 2AM

We anticipate approximately 5 minutes of downtime for the storage device, during which time shared hosting Linux sites will not be available. Additional recovery time for the web servers of approximately 10 minutes is likely required until normal service resumes.

We apologise for the short-notice for this update.

Windows Updates 16/02/2012

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 03:09:18 +0000

We have scheduled Windows updates on most of our servers between 10PM and 4AM between this Thursday Night and Friday Morning, 16 - 17 February 2012. We anticipate up to 60 minutes of downtime during this period for these updates.

The following shared servers will be affected:

MW1
MW2
MsSQL1
MsSQL2

Scheduled Maintenance: WIN.SECURESERVER.CO.NZ Migration

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:02:59 +0000

Impacted System: WIN.SECURESERVER.CO.NZ / WIN.MYDNS.NET.NZ
Start Time: 08/03/2012 00:00 NZDT
End Time: 08/03/2012 04:00 NZDT

During this maintenance window, we will be migrating all customer websites to a replacement server on new hardware. This will improve the scalability & performance of the service we provide to our customers.

Christmas Message 2011

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 08:21:42 +0000

As 2011 draws to a close, we would like to wish all our clients a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We also thank you all for your continued support of our services.

2011 has been a milestone year for us, as we celebrated our 10th year in business. We proud to now be one of New Zealands longest serving web hosting providers, providing some of the best quality and most reliable hosting services in NZ

Proactive Malware Detection Software Installed on Premium Cpanel Plans

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:48:46 +0000

We have introduced a new malware detection system for all of our Premium Cpanel servers, named Maldetect. It is an anti-malware project that has proved to be an effective solution against the use of virii/malware on servers. We have initiated full scans on the servers and have detected some malware files on current user accounts. We have incorporated the maldetect software to check apache (web) and ftp uploads. During the uploading of files to the servers, either via ftp or apache (web), maldetect software will scan the file(s) and it will not allow the upload if a file has a signature matching a virus/malware.

Scheduled Maintenance: Mail Storage Migration

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 10:30:14 +0000

Start Time: 21/12/2011 00:00 NZDT
End Time: 21/12/2011 02:00 NZDT

During this maintenance window, customer mailboxes will be migrated to new storage hardware. This will improve the performance of the mail service.

POP and IMAP (mail checking) services will unavailable during this maintenance window - Customers will be prompted to enter their password when attempting to check mail.

All incoming mail will be held for delivery on completion of the scheduled work, no mail messages will be lost.

SMTP (outgoing mail) will continue to function as normal, but saving a sent message to the Sent folder via IMAP will fail.

We thank you for your understanding while this work is completed, and apologise for any inconvenience caused.

New CPanel and Webmail Login URLs

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 07:12:20 +0000

This announcement ONLY applies to clients on our Premium Grade CPanel branded web hosting plans.

Due to security and server upgrades mentioned in a previous announcement, clients on our CPanel plans will soon only be able to login to CPanel & Webmail through a secure login page. Therefore the old login URL you used to use will be phased out in the coming weeks.

The new logins will depend on which server your website is installed on. Please check your Account information email that we initially sent you when the account was first setup, which should display the server you are on. If you don't have access to this, you can also try logging into to each server using trial and error, which will tell then you the server you are on.

The login links to both CPanel and Webmail can now be found on our updated login pages. The links to these pages can be found below.

CPANEL LOGIN

WEBMAIL LOGIN

Email authentication issue at Auckland datacentre - Resolved

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:41:01 +0000

There was an email authentication issue this morning that appears to have been caused by a hardware failure on our providers primary email storage node. They brought up secondary node and to restore full services, and are investigating why the primary one failed.

No data has been lost and there is no need to reset your email password. We apologize for any inconvenience caused. The issue only affected users ability to connect to the email server.

The email authentication issue is now resolved, with full services restored.

We hope this didn't cause too much inconvenience. Our engineers are currently investigating the cause of the hardware problem on the node and will work to ensure the services are as reliable as possible in future.

PCI Compliance and Server Updates for CPanel Premium Plans

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 06:32:41 +0000

Scope of Work: PCI Compliance
Time: From 10:00PM PST (GMT -8:00) Friday December 16, 2011.

-------------------------------------
PCI Compliance is becoming a standard across all sites handling credit card transactions. For PCI compliance, several reputed agencies like Security Metrics conduct scans on servers hosting the particular website requiring PCI compliance. In most scan results, port 3306 comes up as a security vulnerability. Port 3306 is assigned to MySQL database server for inbound and outbound access. However, allowing inbound connections to port 3306 is now considered risky since attackers can gain access to the database.

Fantastico to be replaced by Softaculous

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 07:16:26 +0000

Over teh comping months Fantastico will be replaced by Softaculous on our Premium CPanel hosting plans. Our providers believe it is a much better replacement, as Fantastico took a very long time to update their scripts and was often installing old versions of the open source software. Softaculous does a much better job of updating, and not only that, it has about 150 more scripts in it, so if anything, it's a better system all the way around. It may take some time for Softaculous to appear on all servers.

Telecom Xtra / Yahoo webmail problems

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 05:15:08 +0000

We have received reports from a few clients that they are having trouble logging into Telecoms Xtra /Yahoo webmail email service. This problem has nothing to do with our own services, or any problem on our network. If you are are having problems with your ISPs webmail system, please contact your ISP directly, eg. Telecom / Xtra, so they can provide support to you.

Alternatively if you are one of our clients, you can use our email service with your domain name, and there are no known problems with our own webmail system.

International Domain Name Scam doing the rounds again

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 04:31:28 +0000

We have been informed that a "pro forma invoices" scam for international domain names is currently doing the rounds again. This happens on a yearly basis, and this sort of scam has been going on for the last 10 years, and we have had many clients who have received these types of letters in the past.

In this case, we are aware of people who have received a letter via snail mail called "Domain Name Expiration Notice" from an American company, who appears to be based out of Australia. They appear to be going through the Whois database and getting domain owners' data to send these letters out.

If you receive these letters, DO NOT PAY IT. If you follow the instructions in the invoice, you risk becomng a victim of the scam. Not only will they bill you more than we charge, you are also giving them authority to transfer your domain name to their management, where you could lose control of it.

Scheduled Maintenance: Router Software Upgrade

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 02:56:23 +0000

We are planning on upgrading the software on one of our routers.

Start Time: 29/10/2011 06:00 NZDT
End Time: 29/10/2011 07:00 NZDT

Impact:
The router redundant so we don't expect any outage. Some customers, however, may experience a small amount of packet loss while we transition their accounts to our secondary router.

We thank you for your understanding while this work is completed, and apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Scheduled Maintenance: SQL Server Migration

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 02:37:07 +0000

Our SQL 2000 Service, mssql.mydns.net.nz will be retired on Friday 18 November 2011. This decision has been made because SQL 2000 is over 10 years old and we can no longer support the software, or the hardware providing the service. All current SQL 2000 databases will be migrated to a replacement server running the latest version of Microsoft SQL, SQL 2008 R2 unless we are advised otherwise.

Email outage at Albany datacentre

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 01:32:42 +0000

This announcement only applies to our Corporate and Business plan users

There is currently an email outage with our upstream providers.
Our providers are working to resolve this. There are authentication issues and that means that your mail client will ask to re-enter your password. We request that you do not enter any password and cancel that prompt as the outage is at the datacentre and when the issue is resolved, you won't have that pop up.

UPDATE: ISSUE RESOLVED 1:30pm

The outage started at 1PM and service resumed at 1:30PM. The mail storage locked-up at 100% usage and needed a reboot to recover. At the moment our providers suspect an Operating System error as all hardware is reported as being OK. Our providers will continue to monitor the service.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

PHP 5.3 Cluster Now Available in Shared Hosting Cluster

Sat, 1 Oct 2011 04:36:15 +0000

The PHP 5.3 cluster is now fully provisioned in our shared cluster hosting, for clients on our Premium Corporate and Business Class hosting plans. The IP address for this cluster is 119.47.114.163 - you'll see this as a domain template: "Default (Linux PHP5.3) (New)"

This has been running for a few weeks now, and shows great performance and stability. This cluster will soon become the default for new sites. If you use PHP extensively you might like to familiarise yourself with the new service. There are a couple of extra benefits on the 5.3 cluster:

Paymex credit card payments not being processed

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 01:14:03 +0000

Our credit card payment provider Paymex has announced that they are no longer processing credit cards due to being closed down by their bank. Therefore we have had to disable the credit card payment option in our domain manager system. We do still accept payment by direct credit, online banking and cheque.
If you have a domain that is due to expire within the next week, and you don't think you will be able to make payment in time, please contact us. We do recommend renewing domains well before the expiry date so there is no risk of them expiring.

Shared Cluster Hosting - Email outage

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 02:34:50 +0000

This announcement only applies to our Nolimits cluster hosting plans, our Corporate and Business Class Hosting plans.

Details
Server: pop3.webhost.co.nz / imap.webhost.co.nz

Services Affected: Customers using shared mail servers.
Details: Customers accessing mailboxes on the server above have been experiencing some authentication issues. This appears to have now been fixed, however the system administrators are still investigating this outage.

Payments using Mastercard not able to be processed

Thu, 8 Sep 2011 01:39:52 +0000

Currently there appears to be a problem with Paymex and it's ability to process Mastercard payments. Therefore if you are registering or renewing a domain name, you will not currently be able to use your Mastercard. People trying to pay by Mastercard will just get an error. Please either use a Visa or Amex card, or select the direct credit/cheque payment option. Unfortunately this a problem with the payment provider Paymex, so is beyond our control. We hope that they are able to fix it soon, but it could be a problem that lasts a while.

Scheduled Maintenance: ATMAIL Webmail software patches

Tue, 6 Sep 2011 04:31:36 +0000

This message only applies to clients only applies to client on our NoLimits Corporate and Business class web hosting plans.

Dear Clients,

We have scheduled the installation of the latest @mail software patches on Thursday night. The patches of the software contain rendering enhancements and general bug fixes.

Start Time: 08/09/2011 23:00 NZST
End Time: 08/09/2011 23:30 NZST

During this maintenance window our current @Mail installation will be unavailable for the duration of the update.

Horde webmail, POP and IMAP services will continue to be available throughout the maintenance window, with no expected disruption.

We thank you for your understanding while this work is completed, and apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Warning for .NZ New Zealand Domain Name Registrants

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:37:25 +0000

In recent months we have become aware that a small number of our domain names clients have been contacted and supplied with incorrect information by other companies in the web development and hosting field. This incorrect information relates to where the domain name is registered, and that the domain name needs to be transferred to the web developers own management in order to work with their new website. This information is NOT correct. If your domain name is registered through us, it will work with ALL hosting servers/websites/email configurations, no matter what they are. All you or your developer needs to do is change the DNS settings or point the domain records to their servers, which can be done very simply inside your Domain Manager account at www.domains.loungenetwork.co.nz . You DO NOT need to transfer your domain to your website developer, in order for it to work with your website/email.

Emails to Telecom/Xtra email addresses are getting delayed

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 06:00:07 +0000

Updated 25-8-2011 - This should now be resolved.

This announcement only applies to our NZ based hosting servers in the Auckland datacentre.

We are aware that Telecom / Xtra / Yahoo are delaying emails which are forwarded or sent directly to @Xtra email addresses, from our providers SMTP servers. This problem is affecting many New Zealand hosting providers, not just us, and is solely an issue at Telecom / Xtra / Yahoo's end, with them blocking legitimate email.

Network Outage at Auckland Peering Exchange (APE)

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 05:29:26 +0000

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business class hosting plans.

At 11:20AM our providers started experiencing packet loss across the edge of our network causing connectivity issues.

Upon further inspection, it was determined that the outage was linked to a network failure at Citylink (who operate the Auckland Peering Exchange) – the issue was was causing connections at the peering exchange to reset continuously. This affected multiple ISPs including our own providers.

.NZ domain Management Control Panels - We provide clients with Full Control

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 06:47:08 +0000

As you may have seen in the media recently, there have been issues encountered by some .NZ domain registrants in New Zealand who use different domain registrars.

Webmail Upgrade for Auckland Server Cluster Clients

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 05:04:33 +0000

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class Hosting plans.

We are pleased to announce that we will be upgrading our webmail installation in order to provide a better user experience. This will offer our clients the newer verison of 'ATMAIL' .The new version of the software contains a whole new set of features which we are excited to offer. Very few hosting providers provide this webmail software due to it's cost, so we are pleased to be able to offer it on some of our Premium grade hosting plans.

The scheduled maintenance window for this upgrade is due to occur below.

Start Time: 19/07/2011 07:00 NZST
End Time: 19/07/2011 08:00 NZST

Server and system upgrades

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 04:49:18 +0000

If you haven't already noticed, our providers are doing some comprehensive updates to the hosting network, for clients on our Corporate and Business Class hosting plans.

Scheduled Updates on the Windows Shared Servers

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 05:32:08 +0000

We have scheduled reboots on some of the servers between 10PM and 4AM between this Thursday Night - Friday Morning, 14 - 15 July 2011.

Scheduled Maintenance: Mailbox Storage

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:18:58 +0000

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business hosting plans.

In order to keep up with increasing demands for storage performance and capacity, our providers will be performing maintenance on one of the mail storage nodes.

Start Time: 13/07/2011 00:00 NZDT
End Time: 13/07/2011 06:00 NZDT

During this maintenance window, we will be migrating mailboxes from the servers that they are currently stored on to new hardware. This will improve the performance of mailboxes via POP and IMAP, and reduce delays in mail processing.

Our advantages over other hosting providers...

Mon, 4 Jul 2011 05:09:50 +0000

We sometimes get asked "What makes your web hosting different over other hosting providers out there?"

Well one of the many reasons is 'Reliability', 'Uptime', and the comprehensive backup protection that we provide on our premium hosting plans. Our premium web hosting plans are all of a business standard.
Server backups have become a more important issue recently, with a number of high profile providers having their servers hacked, and resulting in them losing many of their clients websites.

For a start, our Unmetered Business and Corporate hosting plans have 14 days of consecutive backups. Yes that is 14 days! They are also hosted in a cluster, so should one service go down such as an email server, other services such as your website will continue to operate whist the email service is being worked on.

Our premium CPanel based plans have 3 layers of backups.

*The first layer is the servers all are in raid arrays, protecting them from disk failures. This also applies to our Corporate and Business plans above.

*The second layer is daily/weekly/monthly backups to local backup storage. This way if a hacker attacks a site, or you delete something by accident or numerous other activities we can restore from a recent backup.

*The third layer is our remote disaster recovery backups. These are incremental backups that occur every 4 hours. This would prevent for any type of disaster at the webserver, such as complete wipeout of a site, and it's backups. This would be useful in case a hacker was ever able to take down all data on a server.

Most providers do not provide this sort of backup protection due to the high costs involved. Many low cost providers offering cheap hosting plans will only do daily backups, if they do backups at all.

Although you are also required to maintain your own backup plan as per our terms, the server backups do provide additional protection especially for hardware failure and hackers. Please note that the backups we provide are mainly for server restoration. A service fee does apply if you want us to manually restore a backup for you.

E-Mail Outage on Albany Server Cluster - Incident Report

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 03:07:42 +0000

As you may be aware yesterday we had an extended outage on our e-mail platform on the Albany Server cluster that prevented the downloading of messages from around 11am until 4pm.

We would like to apologise for any disruption this caused to you, and take this opportunity to explain what happened and what our providers are doing to prevent this issue recurring.

Email on the Albany Network - RESOLVED

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 03:59:58 +0000

== Update 5PM ==

Mail service was restored just after 4PM. The last of the queue messages are being delivered now and we expect that to complete in the next 5 minutes.

Over the course of the last couple of months our providers have been building and testing a new mail storage platform designed to address the scalability problems with the previous platform. This is largely due to more clients storing a lot more email on the servers than they used to, as well as clients checking a downloading their email more regularly, including through mobile devices. This all puts more load on the email servers. The final transfer to the new platform was being tested in preparation to do the migration next week. Unfortunately, this outage has occurred before our providers had the opportunity to migrate.

The new platform is expected to eliminate the intermittent IMAP connection problem that has been occurring and allow our providers to scale the platform without future performance issues.

Again, we apologise for the impact this outage has had. We look forward to providing you a much stabler mail service in the near future.

=============

Previous announcement:

We apologise for the continued downtime with the email service. Our providers have outlined the issue and what they are doing about it below.

File system errors were reported on one of our providers mail stores. To prevent potential data loss they chose to do a file system check immediately. All incoming mail is being queued while this happens, but no mail can be downloaded. The amount of mail on the email storage means the file system check is taking an extraordinarily long time. We expect the file system check will be complete before 5PM at which time the queued mail will be delivered and available for download.

Delay in receiving emails/authentication problems on Albany Server cluster

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:10:06 +0000

Services impacted: Email incoming services only. Only clients on our Albany hosting cluster are affected.

Our providers are experiencing a mail queue and at the same rate, there is an authentication problem that they are working on. Some of our email that is sent to us, is also being affected so we may not be able to reply to some emails until this is fixed.

None of your emails will be lost, they are in our queue and will be delivered as soon as our upstream providers fix the problem on their end.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Update: Our providers anticipate approximately one and half hour to resolve this problem. They have decided to do a file system check on the file server that looks after the emails in our cluster. We do apologise for this inconvenient time, however, in the light of things, we had to do the file system check to avoid any data loss.

Update: 1:20pm:
Due to the large amount of data on the drives our providers anticipate a further one and a half hours for the file check to finish. We sincerely do apologise for the delay, but it is important this is carried out.

Update: 3pm:
Our providers estimate a further 2 hours to complete the disk check process and system restoration.
We apologise for the old ETA given earlier, as the process is taking our providers a lot longer than they initially estimated, due to the number of files on the servers.

Christchurch Earthquake and minor changes

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:55:59 +0000

Christchurch has been hit by another major earthquake aftershock, measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale. None of our services have been affected by this earthquake in anyway.

We did still have a very small number of services still hosted in Christchurch region. Due to the uncertainty of the earthquakes, and how long they will continue, we have now moved all of these remaining services to our Auckland datacentre. The earthquakes do cause potential power and connectivity disruptions, so we want to minimise this risk.

The reliability of domain and hosting services that we provide to our clients is at utmost importance to us, and we want to minimise any potential disruption to our clients.

We wish our Christchurch clients all the best in these difficult times.

iSERVE/ORCON Email outage

Fri, 27 May 2011 12:41:00 +0000

- UPDATE - 1:45pm This issue has now been resolved. Email may be delayed as it clears the backlog.

There is currently an email outage on the iSERVE/Orcon network that is causing connection problems for incoming emails. Engineers are currently working on this.

Emails getting delayed on NZ Albany server network

Thu, 26 May 2011 05:12:45 +0000

Services affected: Email

Some of our users are currently experiencing an error with receiving emails. Basically, the emails are being received by the mail cluster, yet they are getting delayed due to an internal connection problem. Our providers system administrators are forwarding the stored mail to the corresponding email accounts, and are also resolving the core issue. We appreciate your patience during this matter.

Routing problem on NZ Albany servers

Thu, 26 May 2011 09:20:09 +0000

Details
Routing problem affecting web and mail services

Update: 09.50am:
Our providers have a temporary fix in place for this routing problem. We are using one of our other providers for the traffic.

Server: Albany Network Servers

Date: 26/05/2011 - 09.16am
Services affected: Web and Email access
Issue: There seems to be a routing issue that is affecting some of our clients access to their websites and emails. Our providers system administrators are looking into this and trying to isolate the source of the issue. We will provide further information, when we have an update.

SMTP Security issue

Mon, 23 May 2011 05:36:00 +0000

Some clients may have received emails from us, regarding changes to the SMTP servers for the server they are on.

Unfortunately, a security issue has been identified with the way our providers SMTP Server handles SMTP authentication. The issue could potentially lead to a server compromise, so they will be disabling certain functionality as a workaround in order to protect it.

To ensure continued SMTP service, please change the SMTP authentication options in your email client (eg Microsoft Outlook) so that it uses plain text passwords over SSL rather than MD5.

Registering domain names under the correct name.

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 06:56:00 +0000

If you are a web designer/developer, or are someone who is registering a domain name on behalf of someone else, you must enter the name and details of the person / entity that intends using the domain name, in the 'registrants' field. You mustn't enter your own details as the registrant. We have come across several domains that have been registered under the name of the web developer, instead of the company that was using it. In many cases the web designer has disappeared, creating a major problem for the company who thought the domain was registered under their name.

Registering a domain in your own name instead of the correct person/entity that intends to use the domain, will create problems down the track, as at some stage both you and the correct person/entity will need to complete a domain name change of ownership form, where we do charge an administration fee.

Therefore please always enter the correct registrants details in the registrants section. If you are a web designer and want us to send you future domain renewal notices, you just need to enter your details in the 'Administrative' details for the domain. Domain renewal reminders will go to the administrative email address. Only the final domain renewal reminder will go to the registrants email address, but as long as you renew the domain as soon as you receive the first reminder, they will not receive that email.

Old unread email in Mailboxes

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 06:32:13 +0000

Our providers have noticed that there are a significant number of email mailboxes on the servers that are not being looked at, and the email downloaded from them. However these email accounts are continuing to receive emails, probably, mainly spam emails. Some email accounts have more than 1 million emails in them . This is causing performance problems for the servers, especially when backing up the servers..

As the email is not actively being looked at, on Tuesday 22nd March our providers plan to remove all the email stored in those account as per our terms of service. We will also delete the affected email accounts to prevent it accumulating more email and becoming a problem in the future.

If you would like us to hold off deleting the email, please contact us ASAP.

Shared Hosting Performance Issues - Resolved

Thu, 3 Mar 2011 05:16:04 +0000

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class hosting plans.
Overnight the Datacentre Engineers resolved the ongoing issues with the shared web hosting platform. We would like to take this opportunity to explain what happened and how they have fixed this problem.

Firstly, it should be mentioned this issue is not related to any other issues over the past couple of months, unfortunately our providers have had a bad run with unrelated systems having major failures causing some disruption to services.

Auckland Datacentre - Shared Hosting Performance Issues

Wed, 2 Mar 2011 02:19:46 +0000

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate or Business class hosting plans.

As you may be aware for the past day-and-a-half our providers have had sustained periods where web sites and FTP have been inaccessible or very slow on our Linux cluster. We would firstly like to apologise for this disruption to your websites and would like to assure you our providers are all hands on deck to resolve this situation.
The datacentre engineers have worked through the night (some have not left the office since yesterday morning) in an attempt to reduce the impact on customer web sites, and resolve this issue.
Rest assured this is our number one focus, and once the hosting environment is stabilised a full incident report will be posted on our website.

Keep updated -

All updates are being posted to our news page:

http://www.loungenetwork.co.nz/statussite.php

Major Christchurch Earthquake 22/02/2011

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 03:12:12 +0000

It is of great shock and sadness to see that Christchurch has been hit by a second major earthquake, which has resulted in fatalities, injuries and widespread damage to buildings and infrastructure. It appears that it is far worse than the one last year. Our thoughts go out to all the people of Christchurch during this disastrous time, and we hope they can pull together and recover quickly from this.

Shared Linux cluster upgrades next week on NZ Servers

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:23:43 +0000

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Web Hosting Plans.

We will be introducing performance upgrades for the shared Linux cluster next week

Server Migration Saturday Night - Mysql 4

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 05:23:21 +0000

On Sunday 19 February the mysql 4 server will be migrated into a new cabinet.

Our maintenance window is planned from 9pm until 4am. We will need to shut down the server, remove it from the old cabinet and then install it into the new one.

The server will be down for up to 60 minutes.

Server Migration Sunday Morning of Win 1 and Win2

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 05:22:27 +0000

On Sunday 20 February two of the shared windows servers will be migrated into a new cabinet.

Our maintenance window is planned from 1am until 4am. We will need to shut down each server, remove it from the old cabinet and then install it into the new one.

Each server will be down for up to 60 minutes.

Scheduled Maintenance 10/02/11 for Windows servers

Tue, 8 Feb 2011 03:52:11 +0000

Scheduled Maintenance

All of our shared Windows servers as well as our SQL servers will have security updates applied to them which require reboots between 10PM and 4AM this Thursday Night - Friday Morning, 10 - 11/02/11. We anticipate up to 60 minutes of downtime during this period and apologise for the inconvenience.

Outages at the Albany Auckland Datacentre on the 7/02/2011

Tue, 8 Feb 2011 01:35:11 +0000

Yesterday as you may be aware there was an extended outage that affected email, web sites and a number of other servers that rely on the datacenters load balancers. We would firstly like to apologise for this downtime; we understand that your web site and email are critical to your business.
We would like to take this opportunity to explain what happened and what is being done to prevent this happening in the future.

Email and Web outage on the Albany Auckland Hosting Network

Mon, 7 Feb 2011 04:15:05 +0000

Date: 07/02/2011 - 04:15pm

Services Affected: Web and Email outage on the Albany Auckland Hosting Network

Issue: There is a currently a problem with our providers load balancer and the datacentre system admins are working to resolve this problem now. We will put more information about it here once we know more.

UPDATE: Normal services resumed at approximately 5 PM.

We apologise for the outage. The load-balancer that triggered the problem is now out of the configuration and we are running off of one load-balancer. Our providers are gathering information on the outage now and they will fully review what happened and what they are going to do to prevent it happening in the future. We will update this when we learn more.

Upload block on *.php files

Wed, 2 Feb 2011 05:24:12 +0000

This announcement only applies to clients on our Corporate and Business Class web hosting plans on our New Zealand based server cluster.

Next weekour providers will start blocking *.php files from being uploaded via web pages.

On the morning on the 7th of February they will start blocking *.php file uploads via the Linux web cluster. Please note,they are only blocking *.php files from being uploaded via web based forms; you will still be able to upload *.php files using FTP.

SPAM emails not getting tagged as SPAM by spam filter

Tue, 1 Feb 2011 01:39:33 +0000

This announcement only applies ti clients on our Corporate and Business class hosting plans, and NOT clients on our CPanel plans.

Our upstream providers are aware of a spam issue where the spam filter is not able to tag email like "Job offer". The system administrators are working on a way to resolve this problem and we apologise for this inconvenience.

Free Website Building tool for CPanel users

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 12:55:04 +0000

We have just updated the free website builder on our premium CPanel plans to version 4. This adds many new and updated features. Many of our clients are not even aware that CPanel includes a free and easy to use website builder, allowing you to setup a website very easily using just your webbrowser, with no programming knowledge needed.

Wellington Aniversary Weekend

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 05:02:55 +0000

Just to let clients know that our office will be closed for Wellington Anniversary on Monday the 24th January.

Mail delivery delay on Albany Network due to spam.

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 05:57:00 +0000

This announcement only affects our Corporate and Business class hosting clients.

There is currently a delay in mail delivery on the shared cluster due to a large amount of Spam.

Our providers are working on clearing the queue so all mail should be delivered early this evening.

Orcon rolling outages

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:03:17 +0000

One of our hosting upstream providers has been having intermittent issues this morning affecting a few of our clients websites and email. Orcon have told us that this has been caused by a compromised website that was affecting all other websites on the servers. Websites are all up and running but we will be continuing to monitor Orcon.

Temporary issue with our email address

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 03:57:58 +0000

Due to a denial of service attack on our own email server, we may not have received emails you sent us between 2pm and 3.30pm today ( Wednesday 19th January 2011). These emails may have bounced back to the sender. Please resend us your email if you sent us an email between these times.

Telecom / Xtra ISP users, and sending email issues.

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 06:20:09 +0000

We have had several clients (those that use CPanel), who have had trouble recently sending emails through their email client software (eg MS Outlook). All these clients appear to be using our servers SMTP server for sending their emails, instead of their ISPs outgoing mail server. All these clients appear to use Telecom / Xtra as their ISP. It appears telecom have made recent changes on their network, that maybe causing this problem. We do know that they can block port 25, which is the normal outgoing mailserver port, therefore all CPanel clients should be using port 26 or port 8025 in their outgoing mailserver settings.

If you are a telecom user, please send your emails via telecoms / xtras SMTP server, and that will fix the problem.

All Telecom / Xtra cusomters also must authenticate their domain based email address with Telecom Xtra if you haven't already done so. Instructions for doing this can be found at http://tinyurl.com/yahooxtrasmtp
If you have any problems sending email via Telecom Xtras SMTP server please contact Telecom Xtra at 0800 110 050, and they will be able to help you set up the above settings for your domain based email address.

MySQL upgrade for CPanel users

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 08:30:42 +0000

Our providers will be pushing all CPanel servers from MySQL 5.0.X to MySQL 5.1.X. This is scheduled

While these updates take a bit of time to complete, they should not affect any scripts, and expected downtime should be under 5mins. Our providers have tested this and rolled out to 2 servers already and had no issue.

PHP 5.2 upgrade Wednesday morning

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 05:20:01 +0000

PHP 5.2 will be upgraded to the latest version this Wednesday for our Corporate and Business plan hosting clients.