Userve Network Operations

Maintenance: 1st Aug 2008 00:00 - 00:10

admin — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:59:13 +0000

Hosting network 1 will be down during the window specified above to replace a faulty supervisor engine in one of our switches. Services will be affected for a maximum of 10 minutes, but 5 minutes or less is expected.

This applies to customers with servers whose IP addresses start with 217.196.1.

For more information please contact support@userve.net.

Customer Portal Upgrades

admin — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:39:39 +0000

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.

Distribution Switch Crash

admin — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:40:35 +0000

We had a network distribution switch crash this afternoon at around 13:20 that will have affected a number of server hosting customers. The fault was fixed within 10 minutes and service has returned to normal.

No website or email hosting customers will have been affected by this.

For more information please contact support@userve.net.

Denial of service on core web servers

admin — Thu, 22 May 2008 09:05:57 +0000

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

Inbound Email Problems

admin — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:23:48 +0000

We are currently experiencing a delay on inbound email due to high load on our antivirus system.

No email will be lost customers with antivirus scanning may find that their email is delayed this morning. We expect the problem to be resolved within the next few hours.

Please email support@userve.net for more information.

Web Server Email Changes

admin — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:16:13 +0000

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.

Internet Routing Problems

admin — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:53:36 +0000

There currently seems to be some routing issues at the main london internet exchange which may affect customers entering our network via that route.

These problems will affect a large number of ISPs and you may notice intermittent problems browsing the internet.

The problem is curently being monitored and seems to be slowly stabalizing.

You can see how traffic has been effected by going to the link below :

https://www.linx.net/pubtools/trafficstats.html?stats=day

Thank You, Noc Team

Core Platform Storage Problems

admin — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:54:05 +0000

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.

PHP 5 Support

admin — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:51:35 +0000

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.

Antivirus System Problems

admin — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:21:01 +0000

Our antivirus system is current under extreme load which is causing it to take longer processing the message queue. This problem started around 12:30 this afternoon and should be back to normal by this evening.

No email should be lost but messages may be delayed.