This is a reminder that at 2am EDT (Toronto/New York) tonight our data center team will be taking our Linux shared hosting system offline in order to install some hardware upgrades.  This upgrade is in direct response to the outage that we suffered last week, and will address a deficiency in our server.  Thank you for your understanding, and we apologize if this outage causes any inconvenience for any client.  We will do everything we can to keep the downtime to an absolute minimum.

It is always a good idea to change your email password regularly, even if the one you use is secure.  If you are using Nerds On Site’s shared email services, here is a quick guide to changing your password:

1. Log into your account at https://mail.nerdsisp.com
2. Click Settings – Account Settings (Under My Settings)
3. Please enter your “Current Password” followed by your “New Password” and “Confirm Password”
4. Click Save

Our team is truly global, and here are just a few photos of our Nerds in action all around the world. Check out the rest of our photos at NerdSpotting.com.

I am spending this week at a technology conference in sunny Orlando Florida, and just had a very interesting conversation with the CEO of a cutting-edge technology company about the basics of hosting: email.  He started the conversation by complaining about how much spam he gets on his mobile device – hundreds in the past day or so.  It clogs up his device and makes working from the road very difficult.  In astonishment I asked him if he had any spam filtering, and he replied that he did have something installed on his laptop, but nothing on his mobile device.  When asked if he didn’t have spam filtering right at the mail server level, he replied that if they did it wasn’t turned on.  Amazing!

There are still so many people, even technology aware CEOs that do not have proper spam filtering protecting their precious time.  Nerds On Site includes an enterprise-grade spam filter free of charge with every email address hosted with us.  Contact our team today to learn how our partnership with SpamExperts can save you frustration and time, and keep your inboxes from become clogged with spam.

Our team recently did some major work for a Canadian Tire store in Edmonton.  The dealer was so pleased with the work we did, he wrote in with his thoughts.

Just a quick note to give you some feedback on the technology clean up and upgrade Nerds did at my store. First of all, I will repeat what I said upon completion Tuesday morning…..”WOW”!! I was expecting to see a noticeable difference in the appearance of the AS400 tower in our computer room but the finished product looks amazing. Not only are the cables organized but they are labeled so we can actually tell what they do and where they go. Aside from the appearance, I am confident that our technology is now current and we are ready to support thin clients and the information kiosks we are adding through our GPS renovation.

One side note, because of the work you did on our internal internet, we not only have a secure network but we were able to eliminate a redundant line coming into our building which will save me almost $1800.00 a year! I don’t often do “endorsements” but you can certainly share our experience with other clients (especially other Canadian Tire stores) and use me as a reference. Talk soon.

Ray Engelbertink
Dealer/Canadian Tire 467

Multi-Zoned MySQL Database Servers

All through 2012, we are working hard to continuously rollout new Nerds Hosting features, and today we are proud to announce our new MySQL database service. mysql.nerdsisp.com is built on Amazon’s RDS service, which gives our clients a whole new level of reliability, speed and backup for database. Just about every new website today requires a database service, and up until now we have been using our own internal, single-instance mysql database service. Starting today all clients can use mysql.nerdsisp.com as their database host, and can still mange it directly through their control panel, including phpmyadmin.

mysql.nerdsisp.com is hosted on Amazon’s cloud RDS platform, and it is a geographically redundant service with 4 levels of backup. The first level of backup is it’s geographical mirror. The second level of backup is a regular Amazon snapshot. The third level of backup is a nightly snapshot of the database system to our shared hosting system in Toronto, followed up by the fourth level of backup with is a copy sent to our ‘ark’ server in Singapore.

We have been testing the new database server for 3 months now with a select group of clients, and it has performed perfectly. All new clients will now be automatically setup to use it, and we will slowly work over time to migrate all existing clients to it as well.

The best part of this new service is that we have added it with no additional fees – it’s included with every Nerds On Site hosting account!  Contact our team today to learn how this new multi-zoned database system can help your business!

Since February 6, our shared hosting platform was under constant attack by malicious users intent on taking down our server.  In the past two days, we suffered many hours of downtime as our team battled this issue.

In the world of web development, two Content Management Systems (CMS) are very popular: WordPress and Joomla.  Both are so popular that they are common targets of hackers, and both have many known vulnerabilities.  It is crucial to keep your WordPress and Joomla site updated with the latest patches as they are released by Joomla and WordPress.  This prevents hackers from having easy access to your site.

Many clients host WordPress and Joomla sites on our shared hosting infrastructure, and the majority of these sites are not patched properly, leaving many vulnerabilities open for hackers to exploit.  This week, malicious users took advantage of those vulnerabilities and inserted a nasty script into many of these sites.  Once the scripts were uploaded, the attackers were able to run those scripts with the intention of disabling our server.  They were very successful with this strategy, and our team spent many hours battling this issue.

While we can do very little about the unpatched WordPress and Joomla sites (beyond warning about the dangers) we have taken a number of steps to combat this issue.  First, our team wrote a special program that seeks and destroys the script that the attackers were placing on the hacked sites.  Second, we edited our firewall rules to mitigate the affects of the script that the malicious users were using.

If your WordPress or Joomla site is still unpatched, your are still vunerable to a successful (and easy) attack of your website.  Please contact our team today to learn what we can do to protect you against these issues.

Our team is truly global, and here are just a few photos of our Nerds in action all around the world. Check out the rest of our photos at NerdSpotting.com.

The Nerds On Site hosting team would like to give advance notice that next week Saturday (February 18) at 2am EDT (Toronto/New York) our data center team will be taking our Linux shared hosting system offline in order to install some hardware upgrades.  This upgrade is in direct response to the outage that we suffered in the past night, and will address a deficiency in our server.  Thank you for your understanding, and we apologize if this outage causes any inconvenience for any client.  We will do everything we can to keep the downtime to an absolute minimum.

Today our shared hosting platform suffered an outage, and we’d like to take a moment to explain what occurred.  A couple of days ago, a client on our systems had their website hacked, and today the malicious user used that hacked website as a base to launch a targeted attack upon another server.  Our data center team shutdown our server’s access to the Internet once they detected this attack, and worked to find the cause of the attack.  Once the hacked website was found and our team cleaned it, our server was put back online.

We apologize to our clients for the inconvenience this caused them.  We would like to take this moment to heartily recommend our Business hosting package to all our clients, as it’s included hack detection service will help to make sure that your website does not fall prey to hackers and become the cause of such an outage.  Contact our team to learn how upgrading to our Business package can help your company today!