One of my clients this week was concerned because her email had stopped working and her website had gone down.  I had another client who had a similar problem only 2 weeks prior to that.

The reason for this was their domains had expired and needed to be renewed. I was unable to assist a great deal because I did not have the login details for their domain registration but was able to direct them as to what needed to be done.  In one case I contacted the registrar direct.

For the woman, what I was able to ascertain is that all domain renewal notices was going to one address only and if she wasn’t using that address anymore, she would have been unaware of the notices.

Depending on the registrar generally the notices come out 90, 60, 45, 30, 15 days ahead of renewal with more reminders leading right up to the day it expires.  If you don’t know when your domain is due to expire and are worried you might miss the notice, there are some things you can do.

1. Make sure the registered domain has more than one contact for it.  There will be the owner, admin, tech and billing contacts.  Make sure the tech contact is your webhost or webmaster, or if you have admin support, then list their address. That way if you miss the domain renewal notices at least someone else will be getting them and can alert you of them.  Alternatively if you have more than one email address, then make sure another one is registered against one of the contact addresses.
2. Make a note in your diary/calendar about a month out before renewal so you can put it in your budget.
3. If you don’t know the date you registered it you can use the Whois services to find that out.  Whois.net for .com, .net, etc and for Aussie domains then it’s the whois service MelbourneIT runs.  After entering the domain address it will give you the details of the registered owner of the site, important dates and also where it is being hosted.

While your webhost or webmaster can look after the hosting and maintainence of your website they may not always be able to assist you with respect to renewing your domain unless you have access to it.  Your domains should always be registered in your name and it’s important you keep track of them.

I provide webhosting services and Wordpress support. I LOVE blogs and enjoy blogging.  So why don’t I write here often?

Because I use this blog mainly for alerting my webhosting clients to updates, changes to systems and warn them of scams, viruses and anything else that might affect their webhosting and blogging enjoyment.

I maintain and write a lot of blogs which are hosted through these services and you can see some of those in the blogroll on this site.

So, if you’re looking for someone very experienced in setting up and maintaining blogs, setting up domain names and web hosting I’m definitely the person you should be contacting!  Even if the number of posts here are low.

A recent alert went out about a worm invading Wordpress blogs that aren’t updated.  This alert is real and particularly  if you allow multiple users on your blog, the threat needs to be treated seriously.

If you are choosing to do the upgrade yourself there are some things you need to do first:

1.  Backup your existing blog – there’s a great backup plugin I use all the time.

2.  Check the amount of webspace left available – if less than 20megs, get the webspace increased first, or you will experience a crash. Believe me – it’s happened to me.

3.  Login to your control panel and then click on the Fantastico icon at the bottom of the panel – it’s blue.

4.  Click on Wordpress on the left menu and then upgrade on the right-hand side of the page and follow the prompts.  Save the file information it gives you for restoring – just in case that’s needed. I usually save that file with the rest of the webfiles for the blog on my computer.

5.  View your blog – it should be showing fine.

If I manage your blog for you anyway, then I will be doing this automatically for you and you may find the dashboard of your blog looks a bit different next time you login – depending on the version of Wordpress you were using previously.

I don’t host your blog or website but you’re visiting here anyway? Then visit my webhosting services for details.

Misleading unsolicited emails from Asian domain name companies

30/Apr/2009

auDA is aware that at least two companies apparently based in China and Hong Kong have been sending unsolicited emails to people with .au domain names, attempting to mislead them into registering their name in a number of Asian domain spaces.

Examples include:

We are a domain name registration service company in Asia,

Last week we received a formal application submited by Yadu Investment Co Ltd which wanted to use the keyword “***” to register the Internet Brand and with suffix such as .cn /.com.cn /.net.cn/.hk/ .asia/ domain names.

After our initial examination, we found that these domain names to be applied for registration are same as your domain name and trademark. We aren’t sure whether you have any relation with this company. Because these domain names would produce possible dispute, now we have hold down this registration, but if we do not get your company’s an reply in the next 5 working days, we will approve this company’s application

In order to handle this issue better, Please contact us by Fax ,Telephone or Email as soon as possible.

and

We are a professional domain name registration center in asia, mainly dealing with the domain name registration and internet intellectual property rights protection.

We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “***” as their domain name and Internet keyword on Apr 2th, 2009. Because this involves your company name or trade mark so we inform you in no time. we would like to confirm if this company is your partner, subsection or some one you authorized, if it is not, pls inform us if these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering them first or not, thanks for your cooperation, looking forward to your reply.

auDA does not have jurisdiction to handle complaints about these emails, as they do not involve the registration of .au domain names. We have been advised that authorities in Hong Kong are investigating at least one of the companies sending these emails.

In auDA’s view the claims made in these emails are most likely false and misleading, and we advise people to disregard them.

Kind Regards,
Adam King
Technical Administrative Officer
.au Domain Administration

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 blog hosted with acswebservices and recently had your site shifted to our new server you might find some odd characters showing up – it does depend on what version of Wordpress you are using.  The characters I mean show up like this: Week’s

This has something to do with a clash between the newer software on the server and that version of Wordpress.  But there is a fix.  You can download the wp-utf8-sanitize plugin which I’ve found to be very useful.  It’s worked about 95% of the time for these strange character sets that show up.  Just download the plugin, unzip the file, copy it to your plugins folder in your blog and then activate it in the plugins section in your Wordpress dashboard.

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.