We had a Denial of Service attack on all our core hosting servers starting at 3:30 this morning and lasting approximately 3 hours.

No server errors were reported but website access may have been slow/timing out. We have blocked the source of the attack from accessing the servers and notified the responsible service providers.

For more information please contact support@userve.net

We have recently had large problems with spammers using security holes in customer websites to send out unsolicited email.

Most sites with email functionality are configured by default to use the web server itself as the reply address. This makes tracing the source of the emails near impossible. We have therefore had to take the step of disallowing any mail that doesn’t have a valid reply address.

If you have a website hosted with us that has a legitimate reason to send email, please ensure that your site is configured to provide a valid, working reply address or you may find the emails are no longer delivered.

These steps should ensure that our services remain stable and responsive for our customers.

If you have any problems or need help checking your site, please contact support@userve.net.

We have been having problems with the storage server on our main hosting platform. This has caused us to move all data onto a backup system. Email users may notice a short period while they recieve no new email, and during this time, website owners will not be able to upload new files to their webspace via FTP. No loss of data should occur and most users should not notice the transfer.

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.