Web Hosting Blog By Leading Edge Hosting

IP Changeover complete

Dear Customers,

This email is announce that the IP address changeover on our
shared platform is now complete and full service has been resumed.

Unfortunately we have experienced several issues during the
maintenance period:

The first problem we experienced was that when we upgraded our
SMTP sending software we discovered a flaw that prevented some
versions of Microsoft Outlook and Mac Mail to fail to send email,
this was a major problem yesterday and we have worked through the
night to resolve the issue. Our tests today show that this problem
has now been resolved.

Our incoming email remained fully operational until approximately
8pm last night when we deliberately switched it off for several
hours. This was done because we needed to revert our email systems
to a prior version due to the bug we discovered in our updated
email sending software (SMTP). As soon as we reverted the sending
software we immediately re-enabled our incoming mail server
(POP3 & IMAP) and full service was resumed.

Our webmail also went down for a period of around 10 hours from
Sunday night to Monday 11am. Restoring webmail was a key priority
as it allowed clients who were unable to send to send email using
our systems.

Despite the issues with email yesterday the IP address changeover
has been a success with minimal downtime, all domains have been
transferred and we are no-longer using the old server, as stated
above, we are operating at full service on the new IP addresses.

We are pleased to inform you that your domains are now running on
brand new top of the range hardware; using an Intel XEON Quad core
processor, 4 GB RAM with RAID, and we also now have a new
dedicated backup server, our Internet connection is also improved
as we now have multiple Gigabit Ethernet connections direct to
London LINX. If you pay close attention you should notice an
improvement in the time it takes your website to load.

We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused during this
changeover, unfortunately it is necessary work, particularly
software upgrades, which are needed in order to help prevent
hackers gaining access to our systems.

We would like to take this opportunity to remind any customers who
are not using our nameservers ns1.leadingedgehosting.co.uk or
ns2.leadingedgehosting.co.uk that they need to update their
A-records to point to the new IP addresses - EVEN IF EVERYTHING IS
WORKING NORMALLY. We have left our old nameservers running and
re-pointed them to the new IP addresses, but these will be
decommissioned in a few weeks time. IF YOU HAVE NOT UPDATED YOUR
A-RECORDS YOU MAY LOOSE ACCESS TO YOUR WEBSITE WHEN THIS OCCURS.

We have directly contacted all customers who we believe need to
change their A-records.

If anyone is still experiencing difficulty with their website or
email, please contact support@leadingedgehosting.co.uk

Best Regards
Leading Edge Hosting
www.leadingedgehosting.co.uk

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Woo hoo - a new look for Leading Edge!

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

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New look in the pipeline!

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!

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

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

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

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.

Posted in Security, Server administration | No Comments »

Billing Systems

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?

Posted in Server administration, billing | 1 Comment »

We have our own IP range

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

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.

Posted in Programming Languages, Security, Server administration | No Comments »