During the next two days we will be making a slight change to our servers.

If experience any problems after we make the change we can toggle settings in your php.ini EZConfig located under the Software / Services section of your cPanel. It’s strongly recommended that after this upgrade you advise me if you’re having any problems with your site.

Most major software platforms will have no issue but some older scripts may require that magic_quotes_gpc be set to on.

As you are aware, we have two servers – acswebservices and acs-webhosting.  For those of you hosted at acs-webhosting there will be scheduled maintenance at 5pm Thursday 20th November AEST.

This is the message I’ve received:

We will be performing scheduled maintenance on your server on November 19th @ 10:00 PM CST (20th @5pm AEST). During this time we will be upgrading our Apache web server to version 2.2.10 (from 1.3.4x). We will also be upgrading the operating system from CentOS 4.7 to CentOS 5.2.

This upgrade will allow us to provide you with a higher level of performance and security. During the upgrade we will also be installing a new set of mod_security rules which will add to the overall protection our clients websites. We will also be upgrading our firewall software which help deflect distributed denial of service attacks and ensure that your sites are kept functioning at optimal levels.

The server will stay online during this time however while the Apache service is recompiled your websites and your client websites will be unavailable for an estimated 30-45 minutes. During this time an unbranded, generic “Under Maintenance” page will be displayed instead of your normal content.

Please take note of this time so you are aware that your site might be temporarily disabled for a short time.

Some sites hosted on acs-webhosting.com may have discovered their front page missing off their blogsite.  Don’t worry – your blog hasn’t gone missing and you can still log in via the wp-admin page.  I’ve notified the web server support and they are investigating it and hopefully should be resolved soon.  My apologies for the inconvenience.

Addendum:  I’ve had a response and it appears that the apache is incorrectly serving the index.htm page for viewing rather than the index.php so I’m manually removing the .htm page off the affected sites while they investigate the cause.

If you have your site or blog hosted on acswebservices.com then you’ll be pleased to know everything was shifted to a new server this weekend and all appears to be working fine. Please do let me know if you detect any problems after about 48 hours – just so we can give things a chance to settle in.

Those with the other server on acs-webhosting.com have no changes to be reported.

Thank you.

Periodically I get the above help message and there are some simple things you can do straight away.

1. Is your web space full?
You can login to the control panel to check that. You should see that you still have space available, or it will let you know if it’s full – usually there is a warning message generated but if your mail box has filled quickly, you might not get it.  If you find that your webspace is getting full quickly, you may need to upgrade your webhosting service to a bigger web space.

2. Is there email blocked in the mail server?
Perhaps someone sent you a huge file that can’t download. If that’s the case, view the offending email and print it off, if necessary, then delete it from your mailbox in your control panel. After that everything should start to download again. You may get repeated messages – that’s normal because the server kept trying to deliver repeatedly and would start all over again till it got to the spot where it was stuck.

3. Have you tried shutting down your computer and starting back up again?
It might just be a temporary problem and rebooting your computer may clear the error.

4. Is there anything else I should know?
Have you recently had something change on your computer, or even changed ISPs?  We may need to do some testing to see what else could be causing it.

Occasionally something just won’t work. If you’re new to being hosted and don’t quite understand how things are set up, then please do not hesitate to contact my office. An email in the first instance is always best but you can follow up with a phone call if you haven’t heard from me in 3-4 hours, during business hours.

Be assured I want to provide you with the best possible service as your web host but if I don’t know you have a problem, I don’t know that you need help. Sometimes it’s just a simple thing that needs doing and I can help you work it out.

I’m making some slight changes to my web hosting billing.  If I am managing your domain name registration as well as web hosting, I’ll be aligning your annual web hosting to become due at the same time as your domain name registration – this way they are in alignment with each other and it serves as an extra reminder for me should I lose track of the billing.  To me it just makes sense to have them occurring at the same time. If you are paying monthly or quarterly, then you needn’t worry as this will remain as is.

cPanel and WHM 11 brings the most extensive update ever to the cPanel and WHM software package. With upgrades in nearly every section of the product, this version enhances the feature packed, security minded and highly stable platform for web hosting.This site provides an overview to the changes in cPanel and WHM 11 as well as the release schedule and cPanel and WHM product information.

New Features

• Enhanced Security
• Tons of New Features
• Improved Design
• Enhanced Usability

The above was taken from Cpanel’s site about their latest update which was ran on our server last night .  Things appear to be running fine but if you come across something you think isn’t right, please do let me know as soon as possible so I can get Andrew to look into it prior to my break.   KMT

If you are using the Wordpress blog software there was an important security upgrade made available.

WordPress 2.2.1 is now available. 2.2.1 is a bug fix release for the 2.2 series. Since 2.2 was released a month ago, the WordPress community has been improving fit-and-finish by identifying and fixing those little bugs that can be so annoying and by fine-tuning some small details. The result is a nicely polished 2.2.1 release.

If you need help updating the upgrade, please get in touch with our office for assistance.

We encourage you also to visit our blog and leave your comments or questions for future posts.

Did you know that cpanel has stats available for you to view? You can log into your control panel and click on the image in the 4th line of icons. It will look similar to the one below.

WS/FTP Stats

Once in click on Awstats and you’ll see a visual display of the stats for your website. You can view previous months or the current month. It will show you your most visited pages, incoming links from other sites, search words used to find you and even the countries your visitors come from. You may even see spikes through the week for days that attract more visitors.

Very helpful if you’re working at promoting your site and finding out what works.