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Frontpage users report that they could not publish updated websites. Now the problem has been identified. However, while fixing this problem something unexpected has been encountered. Now the server is up but some sites have access problem to certain area. We are working on this and the issue should be resolved shortly. Sorry for any inconvenience that this might have caused.
We have experienced slowness in email downloading and SquirrelMail login (SquirrelMail uses the IMAP server) recently. We have found the problem and fixed it. However, to further increase the mail server speed, we have decided to upgrade the mail server to Dovecot. What this upgrade does is that it will convert mbox into the maildir format. This may take a few days to complete. After the conversion, we will test it fully before deleting the old mbox file. If you experience any problem during this upgrade/conversion, please let us know.
As a regular server maintenance procedure, we will perform a hard reboot on Sunday (March 25, 2007) at 23:00 MST (Mountain Standard Time) for our DirectAdmin server - this will not affect our cPanel server. It only takes about 10 minutes or even less if everthing goes well as planned.
Today (Thursday, March 15, 2007), between 6.00 PM and 7.00 PM MST (mountain standard time), the datacenter for our DirectAdmin servers will connect Level 3 to their network as part of their continous and long term strategy of improving connectivity. Testing outside the network has been proved sucessfully in the past two weeks.
Downtime is expected to be less than 1-2 minutes.
Thank you for your cooperation.
As a regular server maintenance procedure, we will perform a server reboot on Thursday (September 7, 2006) at 23:00 MST (Mountain Standard Time). It only takes about 10 minutes or even less.
The datacenter that hosts our dedicated servers have outgrown their current facilities. In order to continue providing high quality hosting services, it is necessary to relocate the datacentre to larger and better premises. The new datacentre have been furnished with top of the range equipment from leading vendors to provide us with the most modern environment.
This new facility hosts a large number of international quality carriers who will be at our disposal.
The Plan for Move
============
The new datacentre is now ready for our servers to be physically relocated.
On Friday, March 24, at 1:30 MST (Mountain Standard Time), they will start relocating our servers to their new home. Unavailability of your site(s) is expected to be maximum 2 hours.
Since the relocation will start shortly after midnight and finish around 3:30 MST in the morning, you and your site visitors will most unlikely notice the down of your site during this move.
The Benefits
========
While planning the migration to their new datacenter facility, the network architects, and hard- and software engineers have taken the opportunity to develop more features and products:
What You Need to Do?
===============
Nothing! This is just a move of the servers physical location, similar to moving your home computer from one room to another. All IPs and nameservers remain the same. No need for you to do anything from your end. You just wait and see your site loads up at a higher speed when the move is finished!
The Recommendations
===============
We will contact you on Monday 20/3/06 with detailed information related to this
relocation.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at https://www.selfwebhosting.ws/orders/contact.php
We apologise for any inconvenience, and we would like to take the opportunity
to thank you for your co-operation.
As you can see from here:
http://selfwebhosting.com/update/11/site-transfer-order/
We have finished all the server-side intallations (OS, control panel, site builder, script autoinstaller, etc.) however the site transfer is only half done. The reason being that we are transferring one site at a time (to monitor which site might carry the Netbus worm) and we do it manually without using any site transfer script.
We are proposing a faster site transfer plan and we need your help…
We are going to set up a hosting account for each of the following domains:
1. chinasprung.com
2. hereisillinois.com
3. mooganinzambia.com
4. jeranon.com
5. nsonzi.com
6. kenten.com
7. tierpal.com
8. vince-coleman.com
9. kindacheezy.com
10. harmonicaresources.com
You will receive a welcome letter from our system whenever your account is created on the new server.
IF (yes it is a big if), you are like me in keeping a most upated copy of your site on your own computer, you can start uploading your site and setting up your email account(s) as soon as you receive the welcome letter. The FTP address for the uploading is the same as the shared IP address you receive in your welcome letter.
PAY ATTENTION TO THIS: IF you do not know how to do it or you do not have a copy of your site on your local computer, then we need you to login to the control panel as soon as you receive the welcome letter from our new server. Then you click the “Support Center” link under “Your Account” to submit a support ticket to request us to do the site transfer. Without specificly requesting for our help, we will not do the transfer for you until after the end of January.
So you have a week to decide on this matter. We require you to submit a support ticket in order not to create a conflict between you and us in terms of who is doing the site transfer during this period.
This also gives you an opportunity to decide if you would like to rebuild your site with siteZen site builder which is included automatically in your account. Since using siteZen site builder will overwrite files in the public_html folder, it is better to start fresh. This builder works with an IP based URL and it does not require your domain’s resolving to the new server as long as you do not publish it. So if you DO want to use the siteZen builder to build your site on the new server fresh, then you need to follow these guidelines:
(1) DO NOT update your domain DNS - let the general public access your existing site on the old server while we build your site on the new server.
(2) SAVE what you build with siteZen builder (from an IP-based URL) but DO NOT publish the content.
(3) Update your domain DNS and wait till it fully resolves to the new server and then login to your site builder and click the “PUBLISH” button.
Since most of you are very experienced webmasters, the do-it-yourself approach should speed up the site transfer process tramendously. However, please abide the following guidelines in uploading your site content…
(1) DO NOT upload the old server’s site backup file to the new server.
Yes, extracting your site content from this backup file saves you the hassle of having to examine and change the permission setting for each file, but it also carries over all the hidden files that exist on the old server.
So the bottom line is, unless you know how to remove these hidden files, do not take this route.
(2) DO NOT upload files located outside the public_html folder.
The new server uses DirectAdmin as the control panel and the old server uses cPanel. This means that the two systems have a complete different setup in terms of file/folder structure.
Luckily, the public_html folder on the new server functions the same as the old server. This means that as long as you upload files in the public_html folder on the old server to the new server’s public_html folder for your account, everything works fine.
(3) Please DO contact us if you need help to restore MySQL databases and make them work with your PHP or CGI scripts.
This is the hardest part of restoring your site on the new server and it does require some basic knowledge as to how MySQL works and how scripts interact with MySQL.
So hope this works better and faster. If you have any concerns about this approach, please do not hesitate to contact us or simply add a comment to this posting.
NOTE: PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR THE STATUS OF THIS TRANSFER…
OK, just let you know how we are going to do it this time for the site transfer from the shared server to the dedicated server:
(1) We won’t copy your site from compressed backup, but directly do file to file transfer using FTP to ensure no hidden files get transferred.
(2) We will copy static html and image files first and then rebuild scripts and databases needed according to the active ones that are using - many people simply tried installing a script and then abandoned it without deleting files associated. Some leave 777 permission setting for certain files and even folders - this is dangerous!
(3) We are going to transfer site one by one. By this I means we will work on one site only until we are sure it is fully working on the new server (inlcuding working after domain DNS update and resolving), then we move onto the next site. This gives us the chance to pinpoint the issue when it occurs.
This method also speeds up the transfer time as far as a particular site is concerned.
Note that your site on the shared server is fully working and we will not remove it from it until YOU and WE are absolutely sure there is no need for it. So just treat if as a fully functioning site (it is!) and keep updating it. We will contact you when it comes for us to copy your site onto the server. Then you can take a rest and let us do the transfer and continue update your site content when it is fully working on the new server.
Again, we are not going to rebuild your site on the new server based on earlier backup copy, but directly from your existing server. We do this to make sure nothing is missed during the transfer.
Here is a list of what we do on the server and the order of sites we are going to do the transfer work on (in the order of ease):
(A) Reinstall of OS for the server (DONE!)
(B) Reinstall of DirectAdmin control panel (DONE!)
(C) Reinstall of billing script (DONE!)
(D) Reinstall of siteZen site builder (DONE!)
(E) Reinstall of Installatron script autoinstaller (DONE!)
1. paceoilfieldhauling.ca (DONE!)
2. harmonicaresources.com (DONE!)
3. cochranephotography.net (DONE!)
4. ruminzhang.net (DONE!)
5. actionzambia.org (DONE!)
6. artreagous.com (DONE!)
7. ascensionlutherancalgary.com (DONE!)
8. burials-at-sea-by-captain.com (DONE!)
9. chinasprung.com (DONE!)
10. davesdelights.com (DONE!)
11. hereisillinois.com (DONE!)
12. mooganinzambia.com (DONE!)
13. jeranon.com (DONE!)
14. nsonzi.com (DONE!)
15. kenten.com (DONE!)
16. tierpal.com (DONE!)
17. vince-coleman.com
18. kindacheezy.com (DONE!)
19. shaneh.org (DONE!)
If your site is not listed, it is most likely on our Advanced package which is hosted already on a dedicated server - so do not worry.
We have a big problem with the new server!
After transferring all accounts over to the new server, we find that some worms get transferred together with our client accounts. While it is very hard to locate every one of them, the data center suggests that we must reinstall everything and not use any script to do server to server transfer. What does this mean?
(1) Don’t update your site DNS to this new server.
If you have done it already, then you need to change it back to:
NS77.WEBSITEWELCOME.COM
NS78.WEBSITEWELCOME.COM
This ensures that your site is visible from the old server. Very important!
(2) We will redo everything from beginning and transfer each site manually 
:-(
(3) We will not recreate scripts that may carry worms.
After the data center (for the new dedicated server) had finished the scheduled network maintenance, we had a problem with the siteZen site builder script installed on the server. Since this script is installed on the root level, we needed to reboot the server while we were fixing the problem.
Now the problem has been resolved and we have basically finished installing all scripts from the root level. This makes us to announce the next step - updating your site’s DNS servers!
In order to ensure the DNS update is smooth and fast, we need you to do it from your side. This is what you do:
(1) Login to your domain manager (where you purchased your domain name)
(2) Pick the domain that is hosted with us - this is done by putting a check mark in front of the domain and then clicking the “Set Nameservers” button if your domain registrar is MegiWeb or GoDaddy.
(3) Now enter the following custom name servers that will point your domain to the new server:
NS1.SELFWEBHOSTING.WS
NS2.SELFWEBHOSTING.WS
NS3.SELFWEBHOSTING.COM
NS4.SELFWEBHOSTING.COM
Make sure you enter all four name servers as they are located at several geophysical locations in the world to ensure your domain resolves properly and quickly to our server even after a server downtime.
Note that we have not touched your site on the old shared server. This means that even your domain has not resolved to the new server, your site is still available for everyone to see - they will not notice any difference!
Give the DNS change at least 24 hours to resolve to the new server. During this time, it is not a good idea to add contents to your site using a domain based URL. Use these IP-based URLs instead:
OLD SERVER (in case you want to grab something there):
Your site access: http://70.84.139.138/~username/
Control panel login: http://70.84.139.138/cpanel
FTP: 70.84.139.138
NEW SERVER (your site’s new home):
Your site access: http://82.103.130.19/~username/
Control panel login: http://82.103.130.19/config
FTP: 82.103.130.19
In order not to miss any emails that you will receive after you initiate the DNS update but before your domain actually resolves, check your emails at both servers - by logging into the control panel rather than using your email client program.
How do you know your site has resolved to the new server?
A simple method is to make a minor change to the home page of your site at the new server - so minor that only you can notice it. Then once a while after you make the DNS update, check your website (using the domain-based URL of course) to see if you are able to see the change.
I would like to use this opportunity to introduce to you several functions of the DirectAdmin control panel (including some usefull plugins):
Note that we give the IP-based URLs here . Once your domain resolves to the new server, you can replace the IP in these URLs with your own domain name. For example, an IP address like this:
http://82.103.130.19:2222/CMD_TICKET?domain=yourdomain.com
will become this after your domain resolves:
http://yourdomain.com:2222/CMD_TICKET?domain=yourdomain.com
Or simply this: http://yourdomain.com:2222/CMD_TICKET
Now the functions…
(1) Support Center
http://82.103.130.19:2222/CMD_TICKET?domain=yourdomain.com
This comes with the DirectAdmin control panel and is located right under “Your Account” after control panel login (or can be accessed directly using the URL above).
This will be used for us to support our existing customers for technical issues. Please use it to submit any support ticket as email is not reliable and is hard to keep track.
(2) siteZen Site Builder:
http://82.103.130.19/zen (before domain resolves)
We have enabled your site to use it without extra charge. The login info is the same as your control panel login.
You can play with it until the end of this month - we now only have an evaluation license right now. By the end of January this year, we will disable siteZen from
all accounts unless we receive a specific request to keep it - by then we will have to pay for a commercial license.
(3) Installatron
http://82.103.130.19:2222/CMD_PLUGINS/iTron
This is a DirectAdmin plugin we purchased and it is basically an script autoinstaller similar to Fantastico in cPanel. It allows you to install most popular scripts with a few clicks.
To know other functions of your DirectAdmin control panel for your site, please go to this wonderful site explaining every aspect of this new control panel:
So much for this comminication. In the next few days we will be building our main site at
http://selfwebhosting.ws
We will also install a billing script and upgrade/integrate our existing affiliate script with this new site. By that time we will add a reseller hosting package which is fully commissionable for all affiliates.
