Woo hoo - a new look for Leading Edge!

November 14, 2008 – 5:53 pm

Yep, we’ve got a tasty new logo coming up. Here’s a sneak preview:

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New look in the pipeline!

November 7, 2008 – 4:27 pm

Yes, we’ve just commissioned a new logo for Leading Edge Hosting, hopefully to be followed up shortly after with a new website!

Watch this space

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In a word - cool!

November 6, 2008 – 9:32 pm

Check us out:

http://www.hyperspin.com/en/ranking.php?type=1

We’re number 41 on the hyperspin list - not bad I’d say…

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Upcoming work notification

September 10, 2008 – 5:12 pm

Hi,

This email is notification that we will be starting some major infrastructure works over the next 3 weeks or so.

We will be moving many of our customers onto our new IP range (we will be sending emails to our customers shortly).

Several customers will also be moved onto our new hardware.

There is the possibility that there will be some downtime, but we will take every effort to keep this at a minimum.

Please bear with us as we perform the work, the improvements to our infrastructure will bring increased robustness to our network, improve performance for all our customers and overall result in improved service.

Best Regards

Leading Edge Hosting

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Hardware Investment

September 10, 2008 – 5:07 pm

It may interest you to know that we’ve just bought another dedicated server for our business.

It’s another beast (Quad core Xeon with two 640 GB hard drives) which we’re intending to use as our Virtualisation server. This means if you’re interested in a virtualised server (all the benefits of a dedicated server with better backups and at a lower cost…) then we’re more than happy to give you a quote.

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Hackers scanning IP ranges

August 28, 2008 – 3:20 pm

Well, I have to say, this is quite a clever way of looking for potential targets!

We have a Chinese hacker (the IP is Chinese) who is apparantly checking all the IP addresses in our new block for vulnerabilities.

This is more impressive than the usual brute-force attacks we say day to day; I can’t believe how many times you’ll see in a logfile someone attempting to ftp using ‘administrator’ or ‘root’ as the username… I guess these low-tech hacking attempts must work occasionally though, otherwise there would be no point.

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Billing Systems

August 28, 2008 – 3:15 pm

We’ve recently started to test WHMCS as a potential replacement for modernbill and I have to say, I’m quite impressed!

WHMCS comes with an import script to transfer everything over from modernbill, and with only minimal configuration I have it running side-by-side with modernbill! All the automated functionality works like a dream, and it’s sending out nice PDF invoices, rather than standard email ones.

We’re waiting to see what happens to modernbill now that Parallels have bought it and integrated it with the Plesk web hosting software, but I am 90% certain at this stage that we’ll move over to WHMCS…

Does anyone know of any other decent web hosting billing systems?

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We have our own IP range

August 7, 2008 – 6:19 pm

Wow, check us out! We’re proper pros now, we’ve even bought IP addresses of our very own from RIPE. We’ll shortly be calling them home, and we’ll be moving all our lovely customers to our new IP addresses in the next few months too.

We’ll be sending out email notifications before anything happens, so don’t worry, but how cool are we?

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The low hanging fruit of PHP

July 31, 2008 – 9:55 am

Well, I’m very suprised, I would have expected to have been asked about this at least at some point over the last 4 years. We do not enable the PEAR library by default for any of our web hosting customers.

Suprised? Don’t be, with major security flaws like this one is it surprising? Many of the base PEAR files are installed as root by default, so with a flaw like the one above, it’s not something we want anyone to have access too.

However, we’re currently evaluating all the various scripting languages we support, ensuring that they are all working properly and things, and so we found ourselves spending quite a bit of time at the http://pear.php.net/ website. It seems it’s quite a straightforward job to install PEAR on a shared server so if any of our customers would like to start using the PEAR packages we recommend trying the method described at the bottom of this page.

In the mean time we’re going to evaluate installing and setting up PEAR in this way, so if you want to save yourself the time of testing it, we’ll be doing it for you. I’ll post back here once we’ve completed the testing.

UPDATE: Finally got round to testing this, and yes, it does work, you can install PEAR using this method.

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Windows Dedicated Servers Now Available

July 25, 2008 – 10:59 am

After successfully implementing our first Windows dedicated server, we’re ready to launch these as a product.

It took time, effort and lots of hard work, but actually, for the first time ever, credit to Microsoft for a Windows operating system, Windows Server 2008 is pretty damn good. Much better than Vista in my opinion.

Anyway, if you’d like to enquire about one of our Windows dedicated servers, please do get in touch, speaking from experience now our Windows servers are incredibly fast!

And you’ll get access to our lovely new backup system

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