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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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