EDIT: Dec 4, 2010 2:15PM CST – The host.avdns7.com migration is complete. Anyone experiencing any problems should open a support ticket. Thanks

We will be performing another set of account migrations beginning this weekend. We will be migrating accounts from host.avdns7.com to a newer and faster server.

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.

We are going to try and get this migration completed over the weekend, but it may take a few days to be fully completed. Please note, that while the entire process may take multiple days, your webhosting account will not be down for multiple days. In fact your webhosting account should not experience any noticeable downtime because of this migration. Each account is migrated one-by-one, so some accounts may resolve to the new server while others still resolve to the old server.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns about this, please feel free to contact support.

Scott

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