Over the next few days we will be migrating accounts from server.ns4ua.com to another, more powerful server. This will be an upgrade for the affected users as the new server has better, more up-to-date hardware, which will serve to provide better performance for those affected accounts.

To see if your webhosting account is part of this upgrade, we have created a migration tool at:

http://amssupport.info/migration

Where you can go to check and see if your webhosting account is part of this migration and it will also give the current status of the migration process in terms of your account.

The migration process will be spread out across several days. This means that it may be a few days before you see your account migrated. The actual migration time per account will be minimal and for the most part you won’t notice the migration.

Scott

We will be conducting another mail server upgrade as we attempt to identify any potential issues with this upgrade before rolling it out to all of our servers. We are planning for this to be our last “test” upgrade, our next set of upgrades for this mail server will be for all of our servers. This has previously been mentioned in posts here and here.

All of our previous upgrades have not shown any major obstacles. But that is the purpose of these “test” upgrades, to identify if there are major obstacles or hurdles that need to be addressed before rolling out the upgrade across all of our servers. Servers that have had this upgrade completed have seen an increase in performance, so unless there are major problems, we will want to roll this upgrade out to our servers as soon as possible.

Potential issues from this mail server upgrade include:

• Users who have their IMAP account set up to automatically purge their trash may notice issues with this with the new mail server software.
• Users who use the POP protocol to check their mail, but leave a copy of the messages on the server, may see all of their mail downloaded into their e-mail program once again.
• Users must use either email@domain.com or email+domain.com as the username when checking e-mail. We did identify an issue where the old mail server software allowed you to use a colon (:) to separate your email from your domain name in your username, but this will not work with the new software.

Users of the server liquid2.wznoc.com will be the next users to have this upgrade. We are scheduling this upgrade to take place around 8PM CDT on Thursday, September 16th. The POP and IMAP services will be offline while this upgrade takes place, which shouldn’t take but about 30 minutes, although we are going to allocate 2 hours for this upgrade.

To see if your webhosting account is on liquid2.wznoc.com, visit our Server Identification Page at:

http://www.amshelp.com/identify.php

and enter your domain name. If the results show liquid2.wznoc.com then you will be affected by this upgrade.

Please refer back to this post for any updates concerning this upgrade.

Steven

As noted in this post back on June 17th, we switched some of the mail server software on one our servers due to ongoing issues. The switch to that software has yielded great performance gains on that server and as a result we are going to be pushing this upgrade out to our other servers.

We did not experience any issues nor were any support issues raised when this server was upgraded on June 17th. This leads us to believe that the migration to this new software is straightforward and users are not expected to experience any issues with the upgrade.

Still, worth mentioning, this upgrade has the potential to cause the following issues:

• Users who have their IMAP account set up to automatically purge their trash may notice issues with this with the new mail server software.
• Users who use the POP protocol to check their mail, but leave a copy of the messages on the server, may see all of their mail downloaded into their e-mail program once again.

Because we want to make sure that there are not any wide-ranging adverse effects to this upgrade, we are going to be upgrading only one server at this time, and monitoring the server and tickets for any issues, before rolling the changes out to all of our servers.

Users of the server soft2.wznoc.com will be the next users to have this upgrade. We are scheduling this upgrade to take place around 8PM CDT on Thursday, August 12th. The POP and IMAP services will be offline while this upgrade takes place, which shouldn’t take but about 30 minutes, although we are going to allocate 2 hours for this upgrade.

To see if you are on soft2.wznoc.com and will be affected by this, visit our Server Identification Page at:

http://www.amshelp.com/identify.php

and enter your domain name. If the results shows soft2.wznoc.com then you will be affected by this.

Please refer back to this post for any updates concerning this upgrade.

Steven

We have spent the last few weeks working to write a set of comprehensive script version checkers. The purpose of this is so that we can check the accounts on our servers and use it to notify our clients when they have outdated software.

As it has been pointed out in our Security Guide series, Keeping Scripts Up-To-Date is one of the best things you can do to insure that your website stays safe from hackers and other malicious users.

While these script version checkers still are not complete and are still going through quality assurance, we have found that a lot of e107 scripts are being exploited on our servers. As such, we will be using our e107 script version checker to find and identify accounts that have outdated e107 scripts and we will be sending out notices to those accounts. While we would have liked to have waited until this system was completely finished, we believe identifying outdated e107 scripts now is in everyone’s best interest.

If you receive one of these notices, please take the necessary steps to update your e107 script so that it does not lead to your account being compromised.

Because we are seeing so many e107 based accounts being exploited and compromised, we will have to disable those accounts that continue to run and use an outdated e107 script on their website. These websites that get exploited cause undue strain and affect the overall quality of our servers.

Scott

We often get questions and inquiries directed to us that are e-mailed directly to us and not through our online ticket system. The online ticket system is an important aspect of the service that we provide.

Our online ticket system has recently been redesigned to make it easier to complete and submit a ticket. You can always access our Account Management Area at:

http://www.amshelp.com
(You may want to bookmark this link for future reference)

Where there are two links to our ticket system, the Contact Form and Support Ticket link. Either of these links will take you to a page where you can submit a ticket.

Sending us a direct e-mail, bypassing the online ticket system, is not recommended. The four main reasons for this are:

• Account ownership verification

• Anti-spam and spam overload

• Cataloging and referencing

• Receipt confirmation

Account ownership verification
For some tasks, whether they be support, sales, or billing related, require some form of verification that you are who you say you are. For example, if I wrote in to my host requesting that the MX records for domain name to be changed, I would be flabbergasted and upset if they did not require some form of account verification before making the changes. The MX records tells the rest of the Internet where to deliver mail that is address to your domain name. If no verification is asked for to validate the request, then potentially anyone could make this request, which is a huge security issue.

Sending your account password in plain e-mail is never recommended. Our online ticket system uses SSL to secure the connection and uses encryption to encrypt the password fields. By using the online ticket system you can enter your account password, or the last four digits of the credit card used to pay for the account, and we can verify that you are in fact the owner of the account, which can be used to validate your request.

Anti-spam and spam overload
Nobody likes spam. Everybody receives spam. We receive a ton of spam messages everyday. Weeding through these spam messages can be a daunting task. Our online ticket system bypasses all of our anti-spam filters and anti-spam measures and those messages go directly to our customer service representatives. This means that if you send us an e-mail, and choose not to use our online ticket system, you run a great chance that the message will get lost in our daily spam clutter. While we try to read through all of the e-mail messages we receive and pick out what is spam/what is not spam, what was incorrectly marked as spam/what was not incorrectly marked as spam, etc, this task can be simplified if clients would just use our online ticket system, and then those messages would go directly to our customer service representatives where the issue can be looked at and resolved quickly. By choosing not to use our online ticket system you may experience delays in having your inquiry looked into, because we cannot continuously monitor the messages that bypass our ticket system. Simply put, inquiries that are raised through our online ticket system get a greater priority.

It is worth mentioning that once a ticket has been opened, you can continue to reply back on that ticket, just be sure to preserve the subject line (Having “Re:” in the subject is acceptable). Our ticket system works by recognizing and letting open ticket messages pass through our e-mail system and go directly to our customer service team. Once a ticket is opened, replies to that ticket are designed to pass through our system.

We do ask that you keep a ticket to one issue. If you open a ticket and then two weeks later experience a completely separate issue that you want looked into, please open another ticket. This helps with the third point.

Cataloging and referencing
This is more of an internal aspect. When you submit a ticket through our online ticket system it is assigned a unique ID number. This allows us to catalog and reference that ticket ID to a particular issue. If a support ticket is raised and our techs and system administrators need to collaborate on that issue, they can easily tell each other that this is in reference to ticket number xxxxxx.

This also allows us to catalog issues. If you experience an issue that perhaps we have not dealt with before, we can make a note of this and the ticket ID and catalog it. This way if someone else experiences this issue in the future, we can refer back to this ticket ID to see what steps were taken to resolve the issue.

Likewise, having the ticket ID helps you – the client – because you have something to reference later. Which brings us to our fourth reason.

Receipt Confirmation
Our online ticket system is designed to provide the submitter with a receipt, a confirmation that the ticket was received. This receipt confirmation works similar to an auto-responder, but it is not the same as an auto-responder.

We have one server that sits in our service cabinet in our office. All online ticket submissions are sent directly to that server. That server then distributes out the ticket to the appropriate customer service area. Once it has done this, it sends a confirmation message back to the ticket submitter, letting them know that the ticket has been received and dispatched to the appropriate party. This is why there may be a slight delay between submitting a ticket and receiving the ticket receipt confirmation.

This receipt confirmation serves two main purposes. One, it lets you know that we did receive your message and that we will be responding shortly. If you do not receive the receipt confirmation, then this likely means that you did not successfully complete the online ticket form or that you used an e-mail address that is unable to receive messages, in which case you won’t receive our replies from our customer service representative. You may want to check your spam box for delivery of the receipt confirmation message. If you do not receive a receipt confirmation within 10 to 15 minutes of submitting the ticket, then go ahead and submit a new ticket as we may not have received your first try.

Secondly, the receipt confirmation message provides you with details about the ticket. The receipt confirmation message will be sent to the e-mail address that we will be replying to and it also gives you the ticket ID of that request. If, for some reason, you never receive a reply back from our customer service team or if you wish to further reference the incident, you can always refer to that ticket ID.

These are all reasons why we stress using our online ticket system. Because we want to insure that you get quality and prompt service for any issue or question you might have, using the online ticket system insures that this will happen. Not using the provided online ticket system causes you to run risks in how your inquiry will be received and handled.

Scott