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

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.

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.

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!

During the month of January, 2012, our shared hosting systems averaged 99.76% of availability. This was a disappointing result after what we achieved for our clients in the December before, but it has only redoubled our efforts to do even better for you! Below is a breakdown of the statistics.

Our clients are busy trying to run their business. Why should you have to worry about silly ‘little’ things like the status of your domain name? The Bay Citizen (a non-profit San Francisco area newspaper) is in disarray these days, what with merger talks and the recent death of their founder. Their domain name was with GoDaddy, and they naturally had more important things to focus on than what their domain name was doing. Sadly, all was not well, and they failed to renew their domain, whereupon it expired and their website went down.

Nerds On Site works day by day to remove these type of stresses from a client’s life. Don’t you have enough to worry about? With Nerds On Site, all domain name are AUTOMATICALLY renewed and constantly managed. We don’t ask a client if they want to keep their domain, we don’t wait for approval or authorization or for you to take a few moments out of their day to understand what the Nerds want this time – we just protect your domain. Also AUTOMATIC, INCLUDED and FREE is domain locking (to prevent unauthorized individuals from stealing the domain) and WHOIS Privacy for supported domains (to help prevent theft and spammers).

If you don’t currently have your domains with Nerds On Site, consider the differences we offer.  Sure, our domains are a few pennies a month more expensive than a GoDaddy domain, but isn’t it worth it to prevent this level of embarrassment?  http://jimromenesko.com/2012/02/03/proof-that-the-bay-citizen-is-in-disarray/

Our team continues to work hard on ways to make our hosting packages more understandable and easy to purchase.  One change we have just made is to rename our hosting packages.  Previously, we had a ‘Basic’ hosting package, upon which you then could add ‘Bronze NerdCare’ or ‘Silver NerdCare’.

Our new matrix has the ‘Basic’ hosting package, just like previously, and now the new ‘Business’ hosting package, which is the same as the previously named Basic hosting + Bronze NerdCare.  For existing clients, the new names will take effect for your March billing period.

This change comes quickly on the heels of another improvement we made last week, which was to include WHOIS Protection free of charge for all support domains.  Many exciting changes are happening, so get in touch with our team and see how we can help YOUR business!