Initial PHP5 Upgrade Schedule - Tuesday, May 8 2007
May 10th: Unix25
May 14th: Unix24
May 17th: Unix23
May 21st: Unix22, Unix15
May 24th: Unix21
May 28th: Unix20, Unix19
May 31st: Unix18, Unix17, Unix16, Unix14
June 4th: Unix12, Unix11, Unix10, Unix9
June 7th: Unix8, Unix7, Unix6, Unix3
June 11th: Unix2, Unix1, Unix
June 14th: Unix4, Unix5

Server Configuration Changes - Thursday, April 26 2007
The upgrade of the system if February has allowed us to incorporate several new changes to the servers and our offerings.

Windows Servers:
We have now installed .NET 2.0 on all our Windows2003 Servers (nt46-nt53). If you have a Windows account and would like to take advantage of this feature and are not on one of those servers, submit a trouble ticket and our support staff can switch your account with minimal downtime to one of the Windows2003 servers to utilize .NET 2.0

Unix Servers:
Starting April 30th, we will be upgrading PHP on all our Unix servers to version 5.2.1. We will also be upgrading FreeBSD to version 6.1, and there will be other minor software updates. Each server will need to be rebooted during the upgrade. We will start with Unix27 and if everything goes smoothly, we will upgrade the remaining Unix servers (check our News and Announcements area for details as they are available). Windows servers will remain PHP 4.4 at this time

Please note that PHP5 has been out for some time now, however this upgrade may still break some older scripts that are not compatible with this version. To make the transition to PHP5 easier, we're enabling the zend.ze1_compatibility_mode directive by default. For true PHP5 functionality, you can disable this directive by putting the following line in an .htaccess file in your web root: php_flag zend.ze1_compatibility_mode Off

You can view the PHP Manual for more information on PHP5:
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/migration5.php
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/faq.migration5.php

Please make sure your sites are compatible with PHP5 before your server is upgraded!!

Microsoft FrontPage
Microsoft announced that FrontPage 2003 would be the last version of FrontPage to be released. They have recently released two new products; SharePoint Designer aimed at business and developers and Expression Web Designer designed for your average web designer. FrontPage has reached its “End of Life” with Microsoft. Microsoft also announced that the Unix FrontPage server extensions have also reached their EOL date. The official EOL date for Unix extensions was June 30th 2006.

Many features used in FrontPage websites are based on FrontPage Server Extensions released by Microsoft. Things like form processing, themes, hit counters and even website publishing. These features are collectively known as the FrontPage web-bots.

We’ve continued to run the unsupported Unix FrontPage extensions on our servers and try to provide as much support for customers as possible. We will continue to do so, but it is important that all customers who utilize Microsoft FrontPage understand that this support will not continue indefinitely. If by chance there is a security problem with these extensions then this could leave our servers vulnerable. Additionally, because new versions of the FrontPage Server Extensions will not be released, if there are future compatibility issues with other server elements, we may be forced to quickly remove the FrontPage Server Extensions from our servers.

Our intention at this point is to offer FrontPage Server Extensions as long as possible. However, it is important that all users who are using those features within FrontPage that require the Server Extensions (counters, forms, themes, http publishing, etc) find alternative methods. You will still be able to utilize the FrontPage program and publish utilizing the FTP method, but many of the web-bot features will not work if the FrontPage Server Extensions are removed.


Thank you for continuing to trust us with your web-based needs.

phpMyAdmin Issues - Saturday, February 10 2007
We are currently having issues with the phpMyAdmin link from within the control panel. Until we resolve the issue you may access it through the link on the following page: http://unix.scoutwebservices.com

Planned Downtime/Upgrades - Wednesday, January 31 2007
Update 2/7/07 7:19 PM
The control panel has been running stable and SiteStudio is now updated. If you have any site specific concerns, please submit a trouble ticket within your control panel.


On Monday, February 5th starting at 10:00 PM EDT the control panel system software will be upgraded. This upgrade is intensive and is expected to take up to 16 hours to complete. During this time there will be no access to the control panel or any of the functions found within the control panel. Additionally, during this time there will be sporadic reboots of the servers that may affect your site for a short period of time, however individual sites and mail should be active during the majority of the upgrade.

In preparation for this upgrade, the Windows servers will need to have a check disk done. The check disk function can take 3 hours or more on each server. Windows servers will be taken down one at a time starting on Saturday, February 3rd at 10:00 AM EDT. All servers will be completed by Sunday evening.

This upgrade could limit your availability to our typical Trouble Ticket system through the control panel at times. Our mail, site and support systems are also on this cluster. If you require assistance during this time and the system is unavailable, you can go to www.scoutwebsolutions.com. This site and system are on a different server cluster unaffected by this upgrade. You will find a Contact Us form on the home page as well as a news ticker that we will utilize, as needed, during this upgrade.

We understand the downtime involved in this upgrade, however it's important to continually upgrade the system. This upgrade will allow us to offer some additional options and new technology to your hosting account. We truly appreciate your patience over the next few days.

DDOS Attack on Mail Server - Wednesday, November 15 2006
One of our mail servers has been under a denial of service attack for the past 8 hours. We are trying are best to thwart the attack, however it is isolated to port 25 and the attack is generating valid TCP connections, and sending valid (in TCP terms) data it is *very* hard to mitigate. Being that its not a standard synflood, the syn proxy methods had little avail. We are being hit with 2000 unique IP's per second.

We are working with upstream providers and an attack consultant to remedy the situation as soon as possible.

If you are having issues with your mail, you may submit a ticket, but we'll keep you updated here. If you haven't subscribed to the news list, we would encourage you too.

Trust we are doing everything possible to get through this attack

*****************************************
Update: 2:47 a.m. At this point it appears we have the attack under control. The mail server is accessable. Any mail that was not delivered due to inaccesability is typically held in a queue by the ISP for 3-7 days and further attempts will be made. If you are having specific issues . . . please submit a trouble ticket in your control panel. Thanks

Cogent Emergency Maintenance - Thursday, September 21 2006
Cogent, one of our upstream bandwidth providers, has issued an emergency network maintenance notice for our data center. They have given the following 30 minute maintenance window during which our Cogent connection will be down:

Start time: 1:30AM EDT 9/22/06
End time: 2:00AM EDT 9/22/06

We will be transferring as many outgoing routes as possible to our Level3 provider prior to the maintenance window. Any incoming routes should fall over to the other provider, but this is contingent on your local ISP's routing policies.

Control Panel Downtime - Wednesday, July 26 2006
On Friday, 8/4/06 starting at 10:00 p.m. EDT, the control panel will be down for maintenance on the database and will not be accessible. The downtime will last for approximately 6 hours.

This maintenance will not affect your domains. All web, mail, and database servers will remain active during the procedure.

Planned Downtime - 4/22 - Wednesday, April 19 2006
On Saturday 4/22/06 scheduled maintenance will be performed on our Control Panel, SiteStudio, NT15, NT31, and NT33 servers.

Starting at 5 PM EDT, the control panel and SiteStudio will be down and unreachable while updates are made. The downtime is expected to be approximately 6 hours. This will only effect access to the control panel and SiteStudio; individual websites (except those servers indicated below) and mail service will continue to function during this time .

Starting at 8PM EDT, servers NT 15, NT31 and NT33 will be taken down to upgrade their hard drives. Sites on these servers will be down and inaccessible during this time. Mail service will continue as normal. Total downtime should be less than 2 hours.

Thank you for your patience during this time.

Control Panel Downtime - Monday, March 20 2006
On Friday, 3/24/06 starting at 10:00 p.m. EST, the control panel will be down for maintenance on the database and will not be accessible. The downtime will last for approximately 6 hours.

This maintenance will not affect your domains. All web, mail, and database servers will remain active during the procedure.

Planned Downtime - 2/17 - Wednesday, February 15 2006
On Friday, February 17th starting at 11:00 p.m. EST the control panel will be taken down to do a database vacuum to allow for faster response times. This downtime will last about 8 hours and will only affect access to the control panel and not individual sites or mail delivery.

Additionally, starting at 11:00 p.m. on the 17th and lasting for about 45 minutes, the core router will go down for a software upgrade. This will affect all sites for that period of time.

Thank you for your understanding during this time.

Control Panel Upgrade - Saturday, January 14 2006
A minor patch for the Control Panel will be installed on Wednesday, January 18th starting at about 1:00 pm EST. There will be limited and intermittent downtime to the control panel and web servers as the patch is installed on the various servers.

Thanks for your understanding during this time.

Online Store Shipping Rate Increase - Wednesday, January 4 2006
Due to a just announced postal rate increase by the US Postal Service, we have had to increase our shipping rates for items purchased through our online store at https://scoutwebservices.com/store/

You can receive a shipping estimate for items in your cart prior to checkout to see the cost of the various shipping options.

Control Panel Upgrade & Downtime - Monday, October 31 2005
On November 1st, 2005 The control panel will be upgraded to the latest stable version. The maintenance window will start at 12:30AM EST and be complete by 8:30AM EST. During the upgrade, the control panel will be inaccessible. This will fix some bugs and introduce new features. Only the control panel will be inaccessible during the upgrade. No user domains, mail services, or databases will be affected.

If time allows and the upgrade goes smoothly, SiteStudio will also be upgraded at that time. Thank you for your understanding during this time.

UPDATE 11/1 9:50 a.m.: The control panel is operational however we are still experiencing issues with SiteStudio. We're working on them.

Control Panel Maintenance - Thursday, October 27 2005
On Friday 10/28/2005, maintenance will be done on the control panel database causing the control panel to be down. It is necessary to perform this maintenance in order to keep the control panel responsive and stable. The maintenance will start at 11PM EST on 10/28 and be complete by 6AM EST on 10/29. Only the control panel will be down during this time. No user sites, databases, or email will be affected.

Thank you for your understanding during this time.

Router Upgrade - Wednesday, September 7 2005
On 9/10/2005 between 1:00am ET and 2:00am ET the main core router will be upgraded to increase speed and security features. This should only cause 20 to 30 minutes of downtime during the switch-over to the new hardware. We would like to allow 1 hour of network downtime to switch the hardware out and reconfigure the ports just to be safe.

All sites will be down during this time. Mail will also be down, however most mail systems will try to redeliver messages several times before rejecting the messages so mail should not be lost . . . only delayed.

Thank you for your patience during this time as we improve our services.

Planned Control Panel Downtime - Monday, August 15 2005
At 11:45 PM EDT Wednesday, August 17th, the Control Panel will be taken down for approx. 6 hours while a full vacuum is run on the database. This is basic maintenance that must be done to keep H-Sphere's database running at top speed.

This downtime will not effect individual sites or email, only access to the control panel itself. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

New Backup Tool Available - Saturday, August 13 2005
We are very pleased to announce that we have added a new Domain and/or MySQL database backup tool within the control panel. This tool will allow you to backup either entire domains or MySQL databases to several different locations including the ability to download it to your local computer. You can then maintain and keep periodic backups of your site easier than before.

To learn more about how to utilize this tool, see our flash tutorial at: http://www.scoutwebservices.com/support/tutorials/backups.htm

Control Panel Upgrade & Downtime - Tuesday, June 28 2005
The database for the control panel will be upgraded starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, July 2nd. This process will take approximately 8 hours and will cause access to the control panel to be down during this time.

This will not affect individual sites or mail, only access to the control panel.

Thanks for your patience during this time.

DotNet FTP Servers Downtime - Tuesday, May 3 2005
On Saturday, May 7th, the DotNet servers will be down to do an upgrade to the main Kernel starting at 5 a.m. EDT. This downtime is expected to be no longer than a couple of hours. Thanks for your understanding in this matter.

Mail Servers Slow - Monday, April 25 2005
A new worm W32.Beagle.BO@mm and variants has cropped up and is propagating tons of email making our mail servers slow. We are currently working on an a "fix" to eliminate the load on the servers.

Until we can put something in place, mail may be delayed (not lost) and you may experience issues logging into the servers due to their load.

We're trying to address the issue as fast as possible.

Thanks for your patience.

Update: 5:30 pm EDT: mail2 server will be down for a little bit while more RAM is installed in it to help process the mail more effectively. Sorry for the short notice.

Update 8:30 p.m. EDT: All the servers appear to be stable at this time. If you are experiencing issues with your mail at this point, please submit a ticket. Thanks

DotNet FTP Servers - Monday, April 18 2005
We have been having some issues with the DotNet FTP servers over the past several days. We have identified the issue, tweaked the servers and found the connections to be working much better now.

If you continue to have issues, please email our support team with your DotNet User ID and we'll take a look at your specific account.

Thanks for your patience.

Mail Autoresponders - Friday, March 25 2005
It has come to our attention that Auto Responders are not currently working in the Hsphere control panel.

This is due to an update during the control panel upgrade.

As many of you know, Our mail servers are not the default design that Hsphere comes with. These custom servers are a good deal more reliable and faster. One issue with this is that when Psoft rewrites the interface between the control panel and the mail servers we have to change the scripts that we use to allow the two to interact. During this last control panel update they did this. It was undocumented and because of this we were not expecting it occur. We are now working to rewrite these scripts. It appears to only effect auto-responders.

We should have this issue resolved within a few days. We apologize for the issue.

Update - March 27: The issue has been resolved.

Planned Control Panel Downtime - Sunday, March 20 2005
At 12:30 AM Monday Morning (March 21, 2005), the CP will be taken down for approx. 3 - 6 hours while a full vacuum is run on the database. This is basic maintenance that must be done to keep H-Sphere's database running at top speed. This is also being done for the upgrade (see below).

At 12:30 AM Tuesday Morning (March 22, 2005) the CP will be down to upgrade to H-Sphere 2.4.2 Patch 3. The CP will be down until the upgrade is done; this should take approx. 3 - 6 hours due to a backend database upgrade that must be done for the upgrade. This will fix a few bugs with the system and should make it more stable.

These downtimes will only affect access to the control panel itself and will not affect individual sites or mail delivery. Sorry for the inconvenience, however this time is necessary to keep ahead of the curve.

AwStats Issue - Wednesday, March 2 2005
We are currently experiencing issues with the upgraded AwStats program configuration on our Unix servers. We are working through the issue and will remedy the issue as soon as possible.

Update 3/4/05 - The issue has been fixed with a push out of a new version to the servers. If you are still having issues, please submit a ticket. Thanks

Control Panel Maintenance - Wednesday, February 23 2005
On Tuesday, March 2nd at 12:30 a.m. ET, the control panel will go down for approximately 5 hours to do some maintenance. This will not affect individual sites or mail, only access to the control panel.

Shell (SSH) Access for Unix Accounts - Tuesday, February 22 2005
We have done some reconfiguring and are pleased to announce the offering of Shell (SSH) access to those who have a site on a Unix server.

To enable Shell access: Choose FTP/User Account from the top menu bar and choose FTP User. Click the icon to request Shell Access. A notice will be sent to our staff and access will be granted within 24 hours.

Use of such advanced features such as Shell can be very detrimental to your site unless you know what you are doing. Access will be revoked for abuse or misuse of this access solely at our discretion.

Shell access is currently available on all newer Unix accounts, but a charge may apply. ($4.95 one-time setup charge and $1.00/month except for Unix7500 plan.)

If you do not see the Request Access link, then you may need to upgrade to one of our latest plans to take advantage of this feature. This is not offered on older plans (Unix-125, Unix250, etc).

We do not offer support for the use of shell. It is your responsibility to know what you are doing with this feature.

Gmail Invitations - Monday, February 14 2005
Not really new or news, but we've got many invitations available if any of our customers would like to get a gmail (Google Mail) account. It's not often you can get a Gig of storage space for free.

We've been using it for a while and like it. Works great for archiving support tickets (shhhh). You can also download the mail utilizing most email clients.

None the less, if you'd like to have an account, send us an email to scoutwebservices@gmail.com.

Please understand this is not an official way to contact us in the future. For prompt responses please submit a trouble ticket or our standard email addresses as they get routed appropriately for a quick response.

More information can be found at http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/about.html

Planned Windows Server Downtime - Tuesday, February 8 2005
On Saturday 2/12/05 at 2am ET we will be performing maintenance on NT3, NT7, NT14, NT16 NT31. We will be running CheckDisk to clear up any errors and also running a system defrag from CD to fully optimize the system and registry.

We will do NT3 first as it's been having more issues than the others. If all goes well on NT3 we will start the other 4 systems immediately after NT3 is finished.

We will do the other 4 systems all at the same time.

Total down time will be anywhere from 2 to 6 hours depending on how bad the system might have gotten over the years.

Thank you for your understanding.

Control Panel Maintenance - Thursday, January 27 2005
At 12:30 AM Tuesday Morning (Feb 2, 2005), the CP will be taken down for approx. 3 - 6 hours while we run a full vacuum on the database. This is basic maintenance that must be done to keep H-Sphere's database running at top speed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

spamGuard Implementation - Monday, January 17 2005
In our continued efforts to eliminate spammers from utilizing our resources, we will be introducing spamGuard on 1/21/2005.

This system will limit each legitimate email address on our servers to 500 messages per 24 hour period. Once the 500 message limit is reached, no more mail will be allowed to be sent from that email address on our servers and that email address will be blacklisted.

This will be true whether email is sent via an email mailbox on our mail servers, mailing list on our email servers, Webmail or a mailing script on our web servers.

As a reminder, all mailing scripts on our servers require that you have a "from" address setting that is a valid email address for your domain on the server.

If you have a legitimate reason to send more than 500 emails within a 24 hour period, we will gladly "whitelist" your email address to allow such. Submit a trouble ticket outlining the request and including:

1) The domain name.
2) The "from" email address to be used to send the mail.

This may seem a little drastic to some, however the issue of spammers utilizing our service through fraudulent signups has increased. Due to some instances of this, our mail servers have been subject to being blacklisted by some ISP's for a period of time which effects everyone. Our goal is to allow legitimate mail to be sent, but to discourage others from even attempting it. If they do, they will be shut down relatively quickly prior to effecting the deliver of mail to some ISP's by other legitimate users.

We appreciate your understanding in our efforts to make our services more reliable for all users.

A Few Changes - Thursday, December 30 2004
One of our goals was to update the design of our site before the new year. Well . . . we just made it. Please share any comments with us or if you run into any issues or broken links. Thanks

We've been informed by Troopmaster Software Incorporated that they will be changing their software configuration and they will start hosting, internally, the FTP sites to be used with their DotNet add-in. See our DotNet Section for more details.

We'd like to take this time to wish everyone a very Happy New Year. Thank you for your support of our service.

PHP Upgrade - Wednesday, December 22 2004
There will be periodic server downtime as we go through each server one at a time and upgrade the version of PHP to 4.3.10 this afternoon in response to a new Worm attack on some PHP application websites. Sorry for the short notice, but this has to be done.

Billing Changes - 1/1/05 - Monday, December 20 2004
To help reduce the costs associated with fraudulent credit card purchases, we will be mandating the use of the CVV authentication system for all credit cards effective 1/1/2005. The CVV number is a 3 digit number on the back of the actual card for Visa/Mastercard and a 4 digit number on the front of American Express cards.

Customers who currently pay for services via a credit card will require to login to the control panel and choose the Billing Info icon; delete you're current credit card on file and reinput a credit card along with the card's CVV code. Failure to do such before 1/1/2005 will cause the system to reject your card and cause any invoices for your account to go unpaid.

Addition - Please note, you will receive a receipt for a 1.00 transaction on your credit card when you do this. This is not a charge, this is only an amount needed for the verification process for your card. Nothing will be charged to your card and the transaction is voided immediately after verification.

We appreciate your help as we make our system more secure.

Control Panel Upgrade & Downtime - Tuesday, November 30 2004
Tonight, November 30th, starting at approximately 9:00 pm EST, the control panel software will be upgraded to the latest release. This will cause the control panel to be unavailable at times for several hours.

Thank you for your patience as we continue to make our services better.

Secure Control Panel Access - Monday, November 15 2004
Sorry for the short notice, but the access to the secure control panel will be interrupted today starting about 9:00 a.m. EST as we reconfigure and update some of our SSL certificates.

During this time you may get certificate warnings or you may be unable to access the secure link to the control panel or logon via our site. During this time you may access your control panel via one of these two links until later today (if one fails, try the other)

http://cp.scoutwebservices.com

or

http://cp.scoutwebservices.net

Please remember these are not encrypted pages and you should interface appropriately.

Thank you for your patience during this time.

UPDATE - 4 p.m.: All should be back to normal now.

SiteStudio Login - Tuesday, November 2 2004
We are currently experiencing a problem with the login interface to the SiteStudio package. We are working on the issue with the developer.

Update 9:27 p.m.: The issue has now been resolved. Thank you for your patience

Core Router Issue - Sunday, October 31 2004
We appologize for the downtime late last evening until about 1 a.m. this morning. The core router went down due to a hardware issue making all servers unreachable. A work around has been put in place. Until the core router is repaired and replaced, access speeds to our servers may not be as fast normal.

Thank you for your patience during this time.

Please remember in such cases of network outage, you can contact us at www.scouthosting.net

Update 11/1/04: The core router has been repaired an put back in place.

PayPal Payment Issues - Wednesday, October 20 2004
Over the past week, PayPal has been experiencing issues with their automated system that allows us to automatically process your payment and apply it to your account or activate a new account.

If you experience issues with the PayPal interface, you can send us the money manually through PayPal at https://www.paypal.com referencing email address sales@scoutwebservices.com and your invoice number. We'll manually apply the payment or setup your new service.

PayPal is working on the issue.

SiteStudio Server Downtime - Thursday, October 7 2004
Sorry for the short notice, but at 8:00 p.m. tonight the SiteStudio server will go down for about 2 hours to do some upgrades and maintenance.

Planned Downtime - Various Upgrades - Thursday, September 23 2004
CP upgrade
Next Wednesday, 9/29/04, we will be upgrading the control panel to H-Sphere version 2.4.1. We expect to be performing the upgrade around 2100 EDT and the control panel will be unavailable for about an hour. Some intermittent downtime may follow during the evening as we deal with any rough edges that we find. 2.4.1 contains fixes for a number of annoying bugs.

.NET
1. Servers are being configured with impersonation, meaning that processes will run under the site owner's uid and not under the .NET user. This should not affect the way your scripts work but will result in permission changes no longer being necessary in most cases.
2. During the coming days and between 0200 and 0600 EDT we will be upgrading .NET on all Windows servers to Service Pack 1. Each upgrade will take about half an hour during which web service on the servers will be unavailable. The upgrade schedule is as follows:

Sun 9/26: NT, NT1, NT2, NT3, NT4
Mon 9/27: NT5, NT6, NT7, NT8, NT9
Tue 9/28: NT11, NT12, NT14, NT15, NT16
Wed 9/29: NT17, NT18, NT19, NT20, NT21
Sun 10/3: NT22, NT23, NT24, NT25
Mon 10/4: NT26, NT27, NT28, NT29
Tue 10/5: NT30, NT31, NT32

Mail
We are upgrading SpamAssassin on the mail servers. New features include Razor, DCC, Bayes, and Pyzor. We are also implementing a patch to prevent POP3 sessions from hanging on machines running Norton antivirus, whose handling of some types of malformed messages is faulty.

IP addresses
The Powers That Be (ARIN) are not happy with our "wasteful" IP address use, and we are required by their rules to limit the use of "vanity" dedicated IP addresses. We will, in the fairly near future, be forced to recover IP addresses from sites that cannot justify their use. Acceptable uses for dedicated IP addresses are secure servers and virtual FTP servers. This is a heads-up and there is no schedule for action yet. When the time comes we will do our best to prevent downtime for sites that need to have their IP address changed back to the system's shared IP.

Hard Drive Failure! - Wednesday, September 1 2004
We've experienced a unrecoverable hard drive failure on one of our servers. The drive is currently being replaced and will be reimaged. The amount of recoverable data is yet to be determined. We'll update this post as details are available.

This effects www.scoutdomainservice.com, DotNet accounts on dotnet.scoutwebservices.com and some accounts on www.scoutinternethosting.com.

Update: 8:07pm
The hard drive has been replaced. We're restoring the system files and will shortly start working on the data files.

Update: 8:28 a.m.
All system files and backups have been restored on the server. We still have to optimize the server and install supplemental programs such as Zend, etc to get the server back in shape. Some features may not work until this is done.

DotNet customers, you should be able to access your information at this point.

New signups and managing accounts on Scout Domain Service or DotNet accounts will not be active until the server is optimized and IP's and SSL certificates are reinstalled. Sorry, we're taking care of our customers before we take care of our own stuff (as it should be).

If you are having issues connecting to your site or DotNet information, please email support.

Update: 12:00
Some DotNet users are indicating continued issues with connecting. If you are having issues currently. Please change the setting for FTP Site:
From: dotnet.scoutwebservices.com TO: 64.5.51.44
This will be a temporary change for those of you who are having issues. In a day or two you can change it back and WE ASK THAT YOU DO.

CP Downtime 7/31 - Thursday, July 29 2004
On Saturday, July 31st, at 11:00 PM EDT, the H-Sphere control panel will be unavailable to upgrade the CP server itself and the database server.

The CP is getting a hardware update to alleviate some kernel panics that have occurred in the past few weeks due to the current hardware setup.

The downtime is expected to be approximately less than four hours.

NEW Flash Tutorials!! - Wednesday, July 21 2004
As part of our mission to offer customer support second to none, we are very excited to now offer over 40 flash tutorials to assist you in completing some of the most common control panel functions.

We've developed these tutorials over the past several weeks and have included a wide variety of topics from Adding a Domain to URL Forwarding. These tutorials will walk you through the process step by step on the screen giving you tips along the way.

The tutorials can be found in our Support area of our website. They show a generic interface (read on to see why) with generic usernames, emails and domains, however they will take you step by step through the control panel functions as you see it.

We would encourage you to try these tutorials out and please give us any feedback you can. After a month or so trial, we plan on offering these for sale to other hosting providers. (thus the generic interface).

Over the next several months we plan on doing tutorials specifically for SiteStudio and osCommerce. If you have another suggestion for a tutorial you'd like to see, we'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for choosing Scout Web Services for your unit's web based needs.

Planned Downtime 7/24 - Monday, July 19 2004
On Saturday, July 24, 2004, from approximately 12AM-3AM EDT, our upstream provider will be upgrading their router. A minimum of 2 intermittent outages with a duration of 15 minutes or less will be experienced within the service window to account for router reboots. This will affect all our customers. An upgrade to our upstream provider's router is required to combat recent security exploits and improve performance, reliability, and stability. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

New Partner Program - Tuesday, July 6 2004
Scout Web Services is very excited to introduce our new affiliate program that allows you to earn money for referring customers to our service. We’ve been able to grow our business over the years by word of mouth from people like you telling other Scout Units, friends, family or business associates about our services. We have now secured a way to reward you for doing such.

By signing up as a partner, you’ll receive a specially coded link that allows our system to track who you send our way. If that person visits us and ultimately signs up for a hosting account, you’ll receive $10.00 for spreading the word. And because we value your business and your word of mouth, we’ll start your new affiliate account off with $10.00 just for signing up as a partner.

There are a variety of methods available to spread the word. In our affiliate control panel you’ll find banners, small icons, small graphics, email templates or just the code for a simple hyperlink on your site. Each of these includes the tracking code that allows us to track your referred sales. Just grab the code from the affiliate control panel and paste it into your site – anywhere you want.

For more details or to signup, visit our affiliate page at http://scoutwebservices.com/affiliate.htm and start earning for spreading the word today.

New Statistics Package Available/PHP Upgrade - Monday, June 21 2004
As part of our effort to continually make our services better, we have added Advanced Web Statistics (Awstats) to our offering for all customers at no charge. This package can help you evaluate the traffic visiting your website.

To enable Awstats login to your control panel and choose Stats from the main panel. Turn Awstats "on" (only on Unix servers, click the Apply link to the right). It will take 24 hours or so for your statistics to be generated.

We feel this is a much better package than the current Webalizer that is offered for free. For those clients who need detailed statistics, we offer Urchin Web Analyst Package for a monthly fee.

Additionally we have upgraded the PHP on all servers to version 4.3.7.

Catchall Mailboxes - Thursday, June 17 2004
Due to recent changes in the way other popular mail services are dealing with spam, we will no longer allow catchall email addresses be setup as forwards to offsite email services. Providers such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN/Hotmail, and other popular ISPs have been blocking our servers for temporary periods of time due to the amount of mail being sent to these providers.

While most of this mail is probably spam, it is all "legitimate" in the sense that our users have setup the forwards or catchalls. However, these services do not care, nor do they inform us of when these blocks take place.

When we discover such a block, we do reroute mail through another server until the block is cleared, so no mail is lost, but it does cause delays in message delivery. Please check your mail setup to ensure that you do not have catchalls setup that forward mail to outside resources. If we discover a mail server has been blocked due to a large amount of mail being sent for a specific domain, we will disable that catchall and inform you.

We do ask however, that you proactively disable these catchalls as they are causing issues for not only your mail service, but the mail service of all our customers.

We also suggest that you do not forward any messages to the most popular of services (Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, AOL). By setting up mailboxes, you can ensure that your mail is delivered safely and not lost due to the outside providers.

Control Panel Interface - Thursday, June 17 2004
In our efforts to enhance usability, we've changed the look and feel of our Control Panel. We hope you'll find this interface easier to use with the information you need readily accessible.

Control Panel Upgrade & Downtime *UPDATED* - Saturday, June 12 2004
**** Update 6/14 4pm EDT *****
The conversion of data is taking longer than expected. We're still working on converting the databases as part of the control panel update. Sites should not be effected, only the control panel access.

On Monday, June 14th at about 10:00 am EDT the control panel will go down for several hours as it is upgraded to a new version of the Hsphere package. This long window of downtime will only affect control panel access and not individual sites or mail. Typically these are done during the late night or early morning hours, but due to the nature and scope of the upgrade the supplier will be involved.

Directly after the upgrade to the control panel, Windows servers will be down for a short period of time to allow for an upgrade and reboot of those servers. Windows servers will be down one at a time until they are all updated. This should encompass no more than 1/2 hour for each server. Unix servers will not be affected.

Thanks for your patience as we continue to make our service better.

Control Panel Upgrade Cancelled - Monday, May 17 2004
Due to some recent concerns with load on Windows servers, the planned upgrade to the control panel software has been postponed. We'll inform you when it is rescheduled.

Planned Downtime 5/16 & 5/17 - Thursday, May 13 2004
On Sunday evening at 10:00 pm EDT maintenance will be done on the router and main core switch. This will cause downtime on all servers for approximately 30 minutes.

Additionally, on Monday, May 17th at about 10:00 am EDT the control panel will go down for several hours as it is upgraded to a new version of the Hsphere package. This long window of downtime will only affect control panel access and not individual sites or mail. Typically these are done during the late night or early morning hours, but due to the nature and scope of the upgrade the supplier will be involved.

Directly after the upgrade to the control panel, Windows servers will be down for a short period of time to allow for an upgrade and reboot of those servers. Windows servers will be down one at a time until they are all updated. This should encompass no more than 1/2 hour for each server. Unix servers will not be affected.

Thanks for your patience as we continue to make our service better.

Planned Downtime on 5/5 - Thursday, April 29 2004
Due to major work that needs to be done to the router and core switch we will have about a half an hour to an hour of downtime on 5/5/2004 beginning at 12:15am EDT. The downtime is expected to be no more than 1 hour.

This downtime will affect all servers. Thank you for your understanding.

Mail Server Changes!!!! - Wednesday, April 7 2004
We are finding more and more ISP's are blocking port 25 for SMTP mail relay that will not allow you to utilize mail.yourdomain.com as your SMTP server in your email setup.

In the past we've indicated that your only choice was to utilize your ISP's SMTP server instead of the one for your domain to send email.

After some testing, port 2525 has been opened up on all the mail servers. This means if your ISP has blocked you from using your domains SMTP server in the past you can utilize it by setting your mail client's setting for SMTP to utilize port 2525.

In the big scheme of things, it will make very little difference, but we thought we'd offer it up as a solution.

Mail clients are very different, but the port utilized by the SMTP is usually found in the advanced settings tab. For instance in Outlook2003 you would edit the account, choose the advanced tab and under server port numbers change SMTP from 25 to 2525. You can then set the SMTP to mail.yourdomain.com.

Control Panel Slow - Monday, March 29 2004
We are continuing to have problems with the control panel being slow. We are working with the developer to solve the issue. If you are having issues logging in please check the Server Status in our support section to see the status of the control panel (cp.scoutwebservices.com)

This is not effecting individual websites, only the control panel to manage your server functions or to signup or change services.

We appologize for the issue and will resolve it as soon as we can.

Update: More memory added and the control panel was flushed, this seemed to take care of the issue. Thank you for your patience.

MySQL Upgrade - Tuesday, March 16 2004
MySQL will be upgraded to 4.0.18 this Wednesday, March 18th, 2004. The upgrade will take place in the evening, around 8pm EST. Downtime for the MySQL servers may be up to one hour, but we will do all we can to make the downtime minimal.

This is a major version increase from 3.x->4.x so we highly suggest you ensure that your script is compatible (It should be) and that you have a backup of your database.

New! Virus Scanning - Thursday, February 19 2004
Virus Scanning has been enabled on all HSphere Mail servers. An infected message will be rejected by the mail server with the return message:

"554 mail server permanently rejected virus infected message (#5.7.0)"


This will definitly reduce the email you see from mass-mailing virus worms, such as the recent MyDoom or today's Netsky virii. In addition, we now allow executable attachments to be sent through the server now that a true virus scanner is in place to block virii.

Planned Downtime on 2/20/04 - Tuesday, February 17 2004
Various servers will be down on a rolling schedule as upgrades and other maintenance items are done between 2:00 am and 5:00 a.m. on Friday 2/20/04

Latest IE Patch causes Control Panel Issues - Wednesday, February 4 2004
Microsoft's latest security patch for MSIE released recently removes some basic functionality that we depend on in order to log into some services through the control panel. The ability to specify a user/pass by using http://user:pass@host/ now has a toggle that is OFF by default. Enabling it involves messing with the registry. This breaks not only Webshell and SpamAssassin but everything else that uses user:pass@host syntax.

If you haven't installed Security Update KB832894 for Internet Explorer 6, Service Pack 1 we suggest that you do not. If you have already installed the update, you can uninstall it by going to your PC's Control Panel, choose Install/Uninstall Programs and revert back to the previous version of IE 6.

Alternatively you can follow the registry changes as outlined in the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;834489 However, messing with the registry can cause severe issue unless you are experienced at doing such.

Click here to download a small program that will change your settings in the registry automatically

SiteStudio Upgrade - Tuesday, January 27 2004
SiteStudio has now been upgraded to the latest version of 1.6RC3. For details on the new features go to http://psoft.net/ssdoc/new_features_rc3.html

Enjoy

Virus Alert - Tuesday, January 27 2004
We typically don't post this type of warning, but we're seeing a lot of traffic on this new worm virus. Please update your virus definitions and be warned.

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.novarg.a@mm.html

Unix9 Issues - Saturday, January 24 2004
We are currently having issues with Unix9. Last night it went under a DOS (denial of service) attack. Access to the server has been limited by this. The issue is being addressed. Connection to sites on this server may be hit or miss.

Slow Server Response - Wednesday, January 21 2004
For the past 24 hours or so we've experienced periodic slow downs due to an issue with a router. The problem is being addressed and we're continuing to monitor the situation. Thank you for your patience.

[Update 1/24/04]Router replaced - problem solved.

Planned Webmail Downtime - Monday, January 12 2004
On Wednesday, January 14, 2004, at approximately 6pm EST. Webmail will be taken offline for maintenance. The maintenance will include an upgrade to @mail that fixes many issues, including some bugs caused by sending to multiple recipients. The database will also be upgraded and optimized. This downtime is expected to be 3 hours.

SPAM Filtering Change - Saturday, January 10 2004
On Tuesday, January 13, 2004, we will be disabling SpamAssassin on a server-wide basis and will be opening it up for people to setup and configure on a per-mailbox basis.

This has many advantages over the current system:
1) You can set your own spam threshold. If 6.0 is too high for you, you can lower it or you can increase it, it's up to you. This determines whether SA tags a message as spam or not.
2) You can add your own whitelists and blacklists. If you know a specific list is sending you mail, you can put them on the whitelist so they won't get marked.
3) Email that you send out will not go through the filters, so it can't be accidently marked as Spam and make you look bad to the recipient of the message.
4) You can decide if you want the message to be tagged in the subject line (as it is now), or not even delivered. This way you won't waste bandwidth downloading spam that you plan on deleting anyway.
5) A per-mailbox filter lets you and your users decide if they want the Spam filters in place or not. Filtering on a per domain basis would be too limiting as you would not have the option to receive spam in just that one mailbox. Per-mailbox filtering allows you full control and the interface is easy enough to use that even your individual email users should be able to login and configure their own settings!

The SpamAssassin configuration will be accessible at http://mail.yourdomainname.com/spamassassin/ The configuration screen is self-explainitory and fairly easy to utilize.

You will be prompted for a username and password. The username is your full email address (me@yourdomainname.com), and your password is your mailbox's password. This is the same information that you supply when you setup your email client (same mail domain, etc.)

Once you login, you will be prompted to enable SpamAssassin. After this is done, you will be at the configuration screen. Here you can decide on the mode (Filter or Delete) and the other configuration parameters.

For more information on SpamAssissin and the various settings, you can see www.spamassassin.org

Please note: The default setting for all mailboxes will be Spamassassin OFF. Users must go in for each mailbox they would like to turn it ON and configure the settings.
For reference, we have been utilizing a setting of 6.0 points required to flag a message as SPAM.

Happy Holidays - Tuesday, December 23 2003
We'd like to wish everyone a very happy Holiday Season. During this time of year our support may not be at the same level you've come to expect as we spend time with our families. Thank you for your understanding.

New Plans and Pricing - Sunday, November 30 2003
We are very pleased to announce that we have modified our hosting plans to better meet your needs. We've included more disk space with each plan giving you more "bang for the buck".

Current customers who would like to switch to these more attractive plans can go to their control panel and choose the "change" icon next to their current plan listing to upgrade to one of these new plans.

Your support of our services has allowed us to continue to add more features and reduce our costs over the years. We appreciate your support and thank you for choosing Scout Web Services.

Planned Downtime on 11/29-30 - Tuesday, November 25 2003
ns, mail, mysql and pg will be going down this Saturday, November 29th, 2003 approx. 10AM EST. These machines will be separated from logical servers to physical servers. They will be down for approx. 3 hours but it could be longer. Also on Sunday, November 30th, 2003 at approx. 10AM EST the same move will occur for the control panel and ns1.

Additionally, during the Thanksgiving Holiday long weekend, support may be slower than usual as we spend more time with our families. Thanks for your understanding.

NT26 & NT27 Planned Downtime - Wednesday, November 19 2003
On Thursday, November 20, 2003 at approximately 10:00 p.m. EST, NT26 will go down for about 4 hours to reinstall Windows 2000 Server. After it's completion, NT 27 will then go down for the same installation.

If you have issues after the reinstallation, please submit a ticket. As always, make sure you have a local backup of your site. Problems are not expected, but "you never know".

Control Panel Downtime - Thursday, November 13 2003
There will be approximately one hour of downtime for the HSphere Control Panel next Tuesday, November 18, 2003. Each different logical service on the servers will be assigned their own IP in preparation to split the logical services up into separate physicals servers. What this means is that mail, ns, and mysql will become 3 separate machines - currently they all reside on one server. The same will be done with ns1 and cp. This should help distribute load and speed up those services.

This will not affect websites, only the control panel will be down while the database and the DNS records are updated with the new IPs. This will not affect your services once the IPs are changed as they will still reside on the same machine. In another week or so the services will be moved to separate machines, this will give the DNS time to propagate and ensure no downtime.

Microsoft Access ODBC Driver - Sunday, November 9 2003
The "Microsoft Access ODBC Driver" is no longer supported by Microsoft. As such, Windows 2003 has issue with this particular driver. We have modified Hsphere so that users can no longer setup System DSNs (ODBC) for Access. As such, we will also be removing the Microsoft Access ODBC Driver from our servers on November 11, 2003.

YOU CAN STILL CONNECT TO ACCESS DATABASES, YOU MUST MODIFY YOUR CONNECTION STRING TO USE THE "Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0" DRIVER!!!!!!

Here is an example connection string:

oConn.Open "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=c:\somepath\myDb.mdb;User Id=admin;Password="

If you are interested in reading about this issue, refer to the Microsoft Knowledgebase article here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;299973

128-bit SSL Certificates Available - Sunday, November 2 2003
We have recently partnered with a major issuer of SSL Certificates to protect your sensitive or ecommerce data. You can purchase your SSL certificate through us and we'll install it for FREE. See http://scoutwebservices.com/ssl/ for more information on the types of certificates we are now offering.

Mail1 Downtime/Upgrade - Sunday, October 26 2003
Mail1 will receive a hard drive upgrade on Tuesday, October 28, 2003. There will be some short downtime while the machine is brought down and the new drive inserted. We will then copy the files over as we can with the machine running. Once the files are moved, the machine will be brought down again to remove the old hard drive.

New Domain Name Service Launched - Wednesday, October 22 2003
Due to our growth we're again in a position to offer you a better product at a better price. Your growth has allowed us to examine alternatives to our previous domain name registrar partnership and we have made a change that will offer better domain name products and better pricing.

Last week we launched Scout Domain Service (http://www.scoutdomainservice.com) with the intent of serving the Scouting community with competitive domain name registration. We can now offer domain names for $14.25/year or $12.54/year if you register the domain name for a 5 year term. We can also offer transfers of your domain from your current registrar to our service for just $12.95 including a 1 year extension of your expiration date. Even better, we can now offer services like domain forwarding, email address forwarding, dns management and alias' for FREE.

Because of these changes you will note that the "Domain Management" link we previously had on our site has been removed and we have put a link to our new Scout Domain Service site. You can continue to manage and renew any domains you registered through us with our previous partner by going to http://scoutwebservices.com/domains.htm. However, we would encourage you to take advantage of our new pricing and "transfer" your domain over to our new service for just $12.95 including a 1 year extension of your domain's expiration date.

Cold Fusion MX - Wednesday, October 8 2003
We are very pleased to announce that we will be providing support for Macromedia Cold Fusion MX for new accounts. There is a $25.00 setup fee and an additional $14.95/month above the current Windows 4100 or 7200 plans.

New Windows 2003 servers have allowed us to offer this package.

SPAM Email - Wednesday, October 8 2003
Due to continued concerns on the part of our customers we have adjusted the SpamAssassin settings so it no longer deletes highly rated emails on our system. Emails that rate higher than 5 via the programs configuration will be tagged in the subject line with [SPAM].

Most email clients have a method for removing these messages or moving them out of your inbox automatically by setting up rules. You can set the rule to look for the word [SPAM] in the subject line.

However, this method always allows you to go and see any emails your client program may filter out.

Planned Downtime 10/3/03 - Wednesday, October 1 2003
Starting Friday, October 3, 2003 we will be upgrading the operating system on our routers. This will cause some periodic downtime until about 3:00 a.m. Saturday morning.

Webmail Hard Drive Upgrade - Friday, September 26 2003
We will be upgrading the hard drive on the webmail server at approximately 2 a.m. on 9/27/03. There will be several hours when the webmail system will not be operational.

Urchin 5 Available - Sunday, September 14 2003
We are very pleased to announce that we are now offering Urchin 5 Web Analytics Software. We have had numerous requests to improve that site statistics software offered (Webalizer) and have decided to offer the premier package in the industry . . . Urchin 5. Urchin uses Adobe's SVG graphics technology to generate gorgeous, quick-rendering, interactive graphs that can be easily pasted into common Office applications. Urchin achieves a high level of accuracy and captures a wealth of visitor parameters via the Urchin Tracking Module (UTM2), a client-side data collection component that transparently sends additional data back to the server and into the log file. The UTM2 uses a first-party cookie to overcome the effects of caches, proxies, and IP-recycling to provide the most accurate and complete reporting available from ANY analytics solution.Simply put, this is the most beautiful and comprehensive Statistics package available on the Web today!For a complete working demo you can go to the Urchin 5 Website

Each Urchin enabled domain will cost $5.00 per month. Urchin can be activated in the control panel under "Web Options" for the domain. You can click the magnifying glass icon next to Urchin to login or going to http://urchin.scoutwebservices.com:9999/

Planned Downtime on 9/23 - Wednesday, September 10 2003
On Tuesday, Sept. 23, at about 23:00 EST, we will be performing maintanence on a few of our network switches to bring them up to speed. The switches will be down for approximately one hour. During that time, you will be unable to reach the servers or sites connected to those switches.

SpamAssassin Update - Tuesday, September 2 2003
SpamAssassin has now been placed on all mail servers. The configuration still such that a rating of 8.0 or higher will deleted from the server. This will not eliminate all spam from your mailbox, however it will delete the ones that definately are.

We no longer allow sending of files with executable content to our servers (.exe, .bat, etc). If a person tries to send you executable content, they will receive a message back indicating the message was undeliverable because of the executable content.

These measures should increase security, stability and performance for all of our customers.

@Mail Webmail Bug - Monday, September 1 2003
Last week a bug was discovered with the @Mail webmail system. When choosing multiple recipients from the compose function by choosing "To", addresses are separated by ";". This will not work and although it appears the mail is being sent . . . it is not.

To send to multiple recipients, choose the address book and check those names you want to send mail to and choose compose. The addresses are separated by a "," which works.

Please be advised of this issue. We are in contact with @Mail over the issue and hope to have it fixed in the coming week.

Mail Server Changes!!!! - Thursday, August 28 2003
Due to the massive amount of SPAM and the impact of many dangerous WORMS and other viruses hitting our mail servers we've decided to make a change.

Today we installed SpamAssassin filtering on mail1. Currently, the load on the machine is well within our acceptable limits. If the queue remains in control and the machine is able to handle the load, then I will be installing it on mail2 in a few days.

We are experimenting with threshold values still.

Current:

At a threshold of 5.0, the email will be marked with:
"X-Spam-Flag: YES"

At a threshold of 8.0, the email will be deleted.

Any file with an executable file, will be scored with at least a rating of 10. This is necessary at least until the SoBig worm stops spreading due to the damage it causes to the queue.

We appologize for the short notice, but the clog on our servers and the massive amount of this junk hitting our que has slowed down our servers and created a potential problem for our servers and our customers. We felt we had to take action immediately.

For more information see http://spamassassin.org.

ISP's Blocking SMTP - Wednesday, August 20 2003
As we previously announced, more and more Internet Service Providers are blocking the SMTP port such that if you utilize their service, you can only send mail through their SMTP service.

Today Fuse and Zoomtown announced the initiation of SMTP blocking for their customers.

You must change your email client software to configure the SMTP server to be that of your ISP rather than the server for your hosted site and email.

Important Webmail Changes - Tuesday, August 19 2003
We have finalized some configuration changes with the @mail webmail system. You may now login to our webmail system by going directly to http://mail.yourdomain.com.

Control Panel Downtime - Friday, August 8 2003
The control panel will be down for about 90 minutes starting at 4 p.m. ET today, August 8th for a flush of the system. This will improve load times. This will not effect mail or any web sites.

UNIX Servers Planned Downtime - Wednesday, August 6 2003
We will be doing maintenance and upgrades to our UNIX servers tonight starting at 7:00 p.m. ET. We will do one server at a time and each server will be down about 1 hour.

We will take down the webmail server on 8/9 starting at 2:00 a.m. ET. It should be down for about 1 hour.

Planned Service Outages 7/17 - Tuesday, July 15 2003
We be upgrading our switches to the newest firmware version as well as making configuration changes to improve performance this Wednesday night/ Thursday morning starting at 3:00 AM EST. There will be 2 outages each lasting roughly