It's been 18 months since we purchased the business, and whilst we have mostly been silent, there has been a lot going on in the background here at Adfreewebhosting. We are getting ready to shift gears a little and we have a few changes to make to accomplish that:

• First up, we will be changing our website from www.adfreewebhosting.com to this one.

• We will run the sites parallel, then adfree domain will get parked on this website.

• This new website is now up and running

• www.yourwebhostingsupport.com remains the central place for support

• New plans have been created, adding a bit of flexibility to your choices.

• People will stay on their current plans, unless a plan move is requested

• We have removed the “unlimited email” accounts because we analysed that email support takes up the majority of our time and most of that isn't even our fault. Additionally, we strongly feel that a business that requires 10 or more email addresses really needs a higher level of support for quick resolution of problems. The plans are now aligned so that we can offer the required support for those needing more email addresses.

Here are a brief list of business and server changes we have made since buying the business.

• Implemented and constantly tweak our antispam / antivirus system culling over 90% of illegitimate email.

• Implemented a modern Help desk and Ticketing system to help respond to your requests better. Tickets were getting lost previously.

• We have begun migrating clients to a new billing and ordering system, a mighty task. This will allow our clients to place orders in real time via the web and login and view all billing information and past invoices and payments – I am sure you all agree billing hasn't been our strong point. Hopefully that will be changing.

• Implemented monitoring of our Servers with SMS alerts to our Server Administrators

• Most importantly, our uptime has been near flawless and we have been able to implement a few custom requests for our customers.

• We are now offering Managed Dedicated Servers.

It's been a hard year learning this business and running I.T. Systems on a much tighter budget than we have previously been accustomed to. You see, we come from the Finance & Insurance industry where IT systems are such a fundamental part of the business requiring 24/7 availability. This business is quite a different kettle of fish but 24/7 availability is still expected as you, our clients are located in all parts of the globe.

Thankfully, we have had Prince to help us out over this time and he has been with the business for most of 5 years and has helped us tremendously during the transition.

Now, we have blown our own whistle a bit, but we still have a long way to go, namely:

• We know our phone response isn't the best – Unfortunately, our time is rather limited and phone calls have a tendency to deviate away from the issue at hand – this has been hard for us to manage and we are looking at ways to fix this. We have some solutions in mind but these will take a while to implement.

• Sometimes – people have difficulty hearing Prince on the phone, as he comes to us via India over VOIP – We are trying to get an immediate fix on this issue.

• Our billing systems are still bad. As noted above, this is in the process of being fixed.

• Some clients have requested special needs that we haven't been able to fulfill, namely:

• Australian based-servers

• PHP5 (this is now possible on Linux using php-cgi and php.ini in your account)

• Later versions of Mysql

• Postgresql – this is on our new server

• We are also looking at offering the popular Django & Ruby on Rails frameworks but these are last on the list, so to speak.

Recent News – Mondays are never good: 12th March especially

What Occurred

On Monday 12th March at 5:40am, a hacker was able to gain access to our srv1.dnstoip.com (Cpanel Linux) server via a vulnerability in a Joomla! Website hosted on our server. Joomla! is an open source content management system that we here have used and promoted for the past 3 years as an alternative to expensive proprietary systems. We are preparing a recommendation for assisting us in keeping security tight for Joomla and other products on our servers.

The Restore

We became completely aware of this situation at 8am and after a short assessment of the damage, began a restore by 8:30am. It takes a very long time to decompress and restore all our data but all was going well until approx 12pm with 100 accounts to go, we lost access to the server. A quick phone call to the datacenter and we had access again after a reboot but the restoration process was failing now. We had to perform a full repair of the Cpanel software and we were back running again. By 2pm, all sites had been restored. Unfortunately, the hacking occurred during our weekly backups and so we could not trust the data from the backups and had to revert back to the previous weeks backups (Monday 5th March). This has subsequently inconvenienced a few people but as we chose NOT to restore databases, the issues were minimal. The actual full process of the cleanup kept us busy until Friday night, so we apologise that we been lacking communication.

The Future

We are now performing DAILY backups on the server and are scrutinizing our backup process with consideration of using rsync to enhance our offsite backups. We have always stipulated in the 'Terms of Service' that backups are YOUR responsibility. This does not change. We do everything we can to maintain continuity of service but hold no responsibility for data loss – never forget to perform your own backups! - Cpanel can help you do this:

How to generate a full backup of your account

How to download a full backup of my account

How to download a backup of MySQL database

Whilst we have repaired the damage and have gone into overkill with security on the server (inconveniencing a few more clients), we also have to perform a reinstall to give ourselves full peace of mind. We have considered our options in detail and feel we have found an excellent solution.

New Data Centre and New DUAL CORE Server

We will be moving our servers to a new Data Center and faster server!! – 1st on the list is the srv1.dnstoip.com server.

Our main reasons for this are:

• This server provides us with almost double the horsepower allowing us to add a few tweaks to the server that should speed your site up

• A Higher level of proactive monitoring and security updates than current

• It allows us to transfer client sites almost seamlessly amounting to almost zero downtime.

Finally, for the record our official business hours are:

Technical Support:

Monday to Friday: 8:30am – 6pm

Emailed tickets are checked and answered sporadically outside of these hours.

Billing Support:

Monday to Friday: 8:30am – 6pm

Saturdays: 9am - 2pm

Emailed tickets are checked and answered sporadically outside of these hours.

All services on our servers are monitored and technicians are alerted if there are issues, so if you find your site or email not functioning, we are generally aware of the issue and working on it if or when it occurs. In these cases, it is best to email or leave a phone message. Depending on the nature of the issue, we will phone or email the respective parties a response when the fault is rectified.