Over the past year we have been working hard on our customer portal giving customers the ability to manage many aspects of their account. Below are just some of the features available (recent additions in bold).

• View upcoming domain renewals
• Manage email addresses and groups
• Ability to manage email accounts (mailboxes)
• Ability to setup out-of-office messages with automated start/end dates
• Full control of DNS records on your domains
• Payment history (if your account is direct debit enabled)
• View antivirus statistics for your domains.
• Create and view support tickets
• and much more…

It is now also possible for users with email accounts to log into the portal using their normal username and password (the same details you would use in Outlook or our webmail). This gives you the following abilities.

• View mailbox details and disk usage
• One-click access to webmail
• The ability to change your own password
• Manage out-of-office messages including automated start/end dates
• Ability to see all email addresses you recieve mail for, as well as the ability to view antivirus reports for these addresses (where available)

For more information, please contact info@userve.net.

We will be upgrading our core web hosting servers to PHP version 5 at the beginning of February 2008. This update will cover all customers other than those with windows hosting accounts. We have stayed with version 4 for a number of years since the release of version 5 to keep existing sites that may contain php4-only functionality working, but there are a number of reasons why we now need to upgrade -

• PHP5 is increasingly becoming a requirement for newly designed websites.
• The goPHP5 initiative, which encourages open source projects to begin requiring version 5 by February 2008. Many important projects such as the Drupal CMS and the osCommerce online shop system support this.
• The PHP team themselves will be discontinuing support for version 4 on the 31st December 2007. This means no more releases, or updates will be available.

We encourage customers to check with the developer of their website that it will continue to function correctly on PHP version 5.

If you have any questions, please email support@userve.net.