SWH Server Updates

Done for all existing clients!

This task took more time than we thought. We have clients who are on several different kind of hosting packages and their sites on different servers. For some clients, we need to verify and re-verify their payments and payment terms. For others we took the effort to streamline all important logins…

Anyway, we have finished the this tedious task and have moved all clients over to this new billing and support area:

www.selfwebhosting.ws/orders

Existing clients please login to this new billing and support area to check all entries to make sure they are correct. If there is anything incorrect, please let us know immediately. Also we need your feedback on the new system. Do you like it? Is it easy for you find your way there? Anything that needs to be modified and improved? Please add your feedback as a comment to this post or send it to us via this contact form:

http://www.selfwebhosting.ws/orders/contact.php

No need to login to be able to use the above contact form and it logs your message into our system and sends a copy of your message to our support staff.

Note the followings about our new billing and support area…

(1) This is the area that you should go if you need support from us. You can submit, view and add to a support ticket after login.

(2) For clients who were in our Advanced Web Hosting package in the past, we have assigned your hosting accounts to cPanel Hosting in the new system.

Just to let you know we are transfering all our clients from the old client billing system (located at www.selfwebhosting.com/services) to the new (located at www.selfwebhosting.ws/orders).

To streamline logins for each client account, we are going to assign a username that is the same as your main hosting account. Should you set the password the same as your hosting account, you could use the same login form we will display throughout our website to login to all these areas:

(1) Client Billing and Support
(2) Server Control Panel
(3) siteZen Online Site Builder

So starting from now, you will receive at least one email message from our new client billing and support system as soon as we finish the transfer of your data into the new system. The email will contain login username, password and URL.

For sites hosted on our new dedicated server, we have added a yourdomain.com/cpanel to yourdomain.com/config redirection function. Looks like someone is still used to type yourdomain.com/cpanel to access the new control panel

This could be used as a good test to see if your website has resolved to the new server yet. If you type this in your browser address area…

yourdomain.com/config

and you get a 404 (file not found) error or you are redirected to this page:

http://selfwebbuilding.com/suspended.page/

then this indicates that your domain has not resolved to the new server yet.

If you type this…

yourdomain.com/config

or this…

yourdomain.com/cpanel

and both redirect to…

http://yourdomain.com:2222/

that is a sign that your domain has fully resolved to the new server.

To my surprise, there are still a few sites whose webmasters have not updated their domains DNS settings to let their sites point to the new server.

Note that we have copied all sites on the old server to the new. But you have to login to your domain registrar to update the DNS settings according to the following nameservers:

NS1.SELFWEBHOSTING.WS
NS2.SELFWEBHOSTING.WS
NS3.SELFWEBHOSTING.COM
NS4.SELFWEBHOSTING.COM

Note that these nameservers are served from different locations so that sites hosted by us can still be visible even though one of these nameservers are down. If your domain registrar does not allow you to enter all four nameservers (they should, but just in case they don’t), then you need to use at least these two nameservers:

NS1.SELFWEBHOSTING.WS
NS3.SELFWEBHOSTING.COM

To test if you are very serious about your website, we are going to suspend all sites on the old server - not deleting, just suspending which can be unsuspended after you contact us.

If your site’s domain has NOT set to point to the new server OR has set but not yet resolved to our new server, you will see an account suspending page when you access your website.

Follow the instructions on the account suspending page to contact us so that we could unsuspend your site on the old server and give you some time to update your domain DNS.

We have made some changes from our side so that the following name servers also point to the new server:

NS1.SELFWEBHOSTING.COM
NS2.SELFWEBHOSTING.COM
DNS1.SELFWEBHOSTING.COM
DNS2.SELFWEBHOSTING.COM
NS1.SELFWEBBUILDING.COM
NS2.SELFWEBBUILDING.COM

Note that we cannot gurantee that they will work right away as we just made the changes recently. At the time of this writing/updating, all six nameservers appear to have resolved to the new server. Also we did this in order to make a smooth transition for your site. We may use these nameservers for other purposes in the future. So please try your best to use the designated nameservers that are given in the beginning of this post.

This means that if you set your domain to point to any of these nameservers, your site should show up from the new server without you doing anything. If not, the changes we made may have not been sensed fully by the entire World Wide Web.

Note that you will see that your site on the new server is NOT as updated as the new server because of the time lag between doman DNS changing/resolving and site transfer. In this case, you can use the following IP-based site URLs to compare the differences and make content updates:

Old server:

http://70.84.139.138/~username (access your site using correct username)
http://70.84.139.138/cpanel (access server control panel)

New server:

http://82.103.130.19/~username (access your site using correct username)
http://82.103.130.19/config (access server control panel)

End Note: Login form for the new server control panel has been incorporated into most pages on our main website at selfwebhosting.ws - here is an example: http://www.selfwebhosting.ws/demo.php
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Since we have transferred all sites on the old shared server to our new dedicated server, we are going to shut down the old server in 10 days starting from today.

If you have not updated your domain DNS, please do so now, otherwise one one will be able to access your site even it exists on the new server.

So you need to point your domain to the new server by February 27, 2006.

How to do it? You need to log into your domain registrar and update DNS settings to all four nameservers that were sent to you.

If you need help, please let us know by submitting a support ticket.

Meanwhile, we are redesigning our website here: www.selfwebhosting.ws

We have finished installing our new billing script here: http://www.selfwebhosting.ws/orders and we are in the process of integrating it with our existing affiliate program.

One user reported that Squirrelmail could not be accessed at all. Now we have fixed the problem and you should be able to access both Squirrelmail and UebiMiau webmail from the control panel or directly from your browser. Cheers!

We have copied all sites on the old shared server over to the new dedicated server and we are backing up each site on the new server on a daily basis. We have not detected any Netbus worm yet

Please check your site on the new server using the IP-based URL in your welcome letter to make sure everything works OK. If everything does work OK, please update your domain DNS according to the settings listed in your welcome letter. Please do so as soon as possible.

The old server will still function for another 30 days but we could not guarantee its operation - that was the reason why chose to switch over to the new dedicated server in the first place, remember?

Updating your domain DNS now gives you a chance to examine your site on the new server for 30 days. If indeed there are some minor issues here and there, 30 days are plenty for you to pinpoint these issues and solve them. Any you have your full working site on the old server to compare settings if you do need to refer to it.

After the 30 days have passed (starting from today), we will close down the old server.

So again, if your site was hosted with a Standard package in the past, that means that it is on the old shared server and we have already copied your site over to the new dedicated server. But we need you to make the DNS changes so that your domain will point to your site on the new server.

Note that for sites hosted with the Advanced package, they are already on a dedicated server. So no need to change anything whatsoever.

If you do not understand what this means, please submit a support ticket through one of the following links:

(1) Control Panel on the new server:

http://82.103.130.19:2222/CMD_TICKET?domain=yourdomain.com

Make sure to replace yourdomain.com with your own domain. The login info have been given to you in the latest welcome letter sent to your email in our record from the server.

Make sure your contact email address is set correctly by clicking the “Site Summary / Statistics / Logs” link right after login. This is the email address the system uses to send a copy of your ticket update.

If for any reason the above support link does not work for you, please use this one…

(2) Presale Support Desk:

http://www.helplogin.com/ticket/open.php

This is meant for general public who have not signed up for any services with us to submit a question. You should definitely use this one if nothing else works for you.

Direct email contact works but we cannot guarantee your email will reach us. Use one of the above ticket systems can allow us to track and update your ticket easily. And each ticket system sends a copy of new update to your email as well. Thank you for your understanding on this.

Lastly, we highly recommend that you subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog as we use it to post any updates related to your site and our server. We will try to email you important updates but as we said email is not a guaranteed way to commnicate during the increasing problem of email spamming and filtering.

So if you care about your site and our server, please subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog. Do it now if you have not. If you do not know how, please read this post:

http://selfwebhosting.com/update/3/how-to-subscribe-to-the-rss-feed-of-this-blog

All the best!

Because of the increasing problem of email spams, we highly recommend that you subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog so that you automatically receive our important updates such as Server Status and Maintenance notices.

You can use any of the subscribe buttons displayed on the right menu to add the feed of this blog to your favorite platofrm. Or you can read on for ways to automatically receive an update whenever we add it to this blog.

Here is how to do it using Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client program (Outlook Express does not have this feature yet )

If you have already had a “RSS News & Blogs” account in your Thunderbird, you should use these simple steps to ADD this blog feed to it:

1. Find and right-click the name of this “RSS News & Blogs” account from the left menu.

2. Select “Properties…” and a new window will pop up

3. Click on the button “Manage Subscriptions…” and another smaller window should pop up

4. Click on the “Add” button and you will be able to enter the RSS feed URL of this blog: http://selfwebhosting.com/update/feed/. Note that this is the feed URL for all categories. If you would like to get the feed URL for a particular category, just move your mouse over the category link and copy its hyperlink. When you ready to paste the link to the RSS feel URL field, just append /feed/ to the end of the link. Take for example, the link to the Server Status|Maintenance category is http://selfwebhosting.com/update/category/server-status-maintenance/ so its feed URL is http://selfwebhosting.com/update/category/server-status-maintenance/feed.

5. Select “Show the article summary instead of loading the web page” and then click “OK” - done!

If you have just downloaded and installed Thunderbird, following the steps below to create a “RSS News & Blogs” account where you can store our updates:

1. Click from Thunderbird menu in this sequence: File > New > Account

2. A new account setup window pops up. Select “RSS News & Blogs” and click “Next“

3. Enter an account name, say, “RSS News & Blogs“

4. Click the “Finish” button to save and exit

Once you have created a “RSS News & Blogs” account this way, you can follow the above steps to ADD our blog feed URL to your blog subscriptions.

Thank you for dropping by. Please browse what we have posted here on this blog.